MORNINGS in Port au-Prince, just before dawn,
as the last, scattered gunshots faded in the distance and the outlines
of the city began to take shape in the dirty air — tiny houses, painted
aqua and salmon; the huge and ghostly National Palace, gleaming white;
gray and rust-colored slums, canopied in smoke — my colleagues and I
would go off in search of bodies. This was during the days leading up
to Sunday, November 29, 1987, the day of the election that was to bring
democracy to Haiti. Each morning, we would meet in the darkness in front
of the Holiday Inn, near the glass doors of a newly opened press center,
through which we could just make out banks of telephones and telexes and
stacks of cheerful red-and-blue election press kits. During those last
days, foreign correspondents and international observers and election
experts poured into the country, and the afternoons were filled with solemn
press conferences, but the real story unfolded at night. It was a loud
and violent conversation, meant to be overheard: one followed its progress
by charting the gunshots echoing over the city, then read the results
by cruising the streets at daybreak to count the corpses.

On the Tuesday before the election, we set out in the white early morning,
skirting the Champ de Mars park, and passing beneath hundreds of little
blue-and-red flags that hung limply from the telephone wires, celebrating
Haiti's new democracy, and under banners stretched across the main streets
exhorting Haitians to vote. Following the brown smoke billowing in the
distance, we drove slowly through the waking capital, and soon, as we
circled the perimeter of the great bidonville ("tin-can city")
of La Saline, already covered over in brown cooking smoke and blurry in
the rising heat, we found the first remnant of the night's conversation.
Not far from rows of brightly colored camionnettes, called "tap taps,"
just in from the countryside, where shirtless, sweating men were unloading
baskets of mangoes and bunches of green bananas and great dirty bags of
charcoal to feed the tens of thousands of cooking fires in the vast slum,
we came upon a clump of chattering people — a sight that in Haiti that
week invariably meant a body.

Pushing through the crowd, we, discovered a tall, lean young man, several
hours dead, laid out carefully on Haiti's Route Nationale 1. His body
had been prepared for its role: a rope had been twisted about his neck,
and above the frayed noose a metal necklace had been pulled tight around
his chin, but most of it had disappeared into the gaping maroon slashes
around his mouth and throat. Distinct, deep machete cuts in a V-shaped
pattern above and below the mouth, they seemed almost an attempt to construct
for the victim, after death, a parody second mouth. A partly smoked cigarette
had been placed between his lips, a charred wooden match balanced jauntily
on his chin. Within easy reach next to his stomach, which, left exposed,
was already dense with flies in the rising heat, were a handful of rice,
a can of tomato sauce, and a slab of cheese, all displayed on a scrap
of brown cardboard. "That's so he can eat," an old man said,
laughing, bringing on the laughter of the crowd. "And the cigarette,
that's to keep him happy." There was no blood on his shirt, the old
man said, because when they spotted him near the La Saline marketplace
early that morning, as gunshots echoed in the distance, this tall young
man had been wearing a dress — the all-purpose Haitian disguise — and
carrying a can of gasoline. He was a Tonton Macoute, they said, a member
of Jean-Claude Duvalier's militia — one of the thousands who had gone
into hiding after the fall of the dictator, nearly two years earlier,
and who now, during the months of growing violence, had begun to reappear
in the neighborhood. He had come to spread terror by bringing to the people
of La Saline what they dreaded most: a fire that in seconds would roar
through the dense labyrinth of dry scrap-wood hovels, leaving scores of
people dead and thousands homeless.

But the brigades de vigilance — neighborhood committees that had formed
themselves in these last days of terror — had been watching. And when
the Macoute appeared in that dark and now deserted marketplace, wearing
his dress and carrying his can of gasoline, the brigade slum boys let
out a shout and gave chase, pursuing him down the tiny alleyways, over
the ditches filled with pale-green waste, until at last they caught him,
dragging him to the ground beneath the black mountains of the vast charcoal
yard. There, in front of the angry, shouting crowd, the slum boys stunned
him with their machetes, then lynched him. They prepared the body and
left it on the road for Guédé, the voodoo lord of the Crossroads to the
Underworld, to attend to in his own good time — for Guédé, despite his
great power, often appears as a poor wandering beggar, a famished traveler
who would be sure to look kindly on the sumptuous meal of rice and sauce
and cheese that had been left beside the young man's lifeless hand.

Fire was the chosen means of night terror in that election week. A few
hours before dawn the previous day, a mob of men armed with heavy clubs
had stormed into the Marché Salomon, a huge, lofty building, with concrete
arches and a sheet-metal roof, that since the late nineteenth century
had housed one of the city's main public markets. Shouting and screaming
in the darkness, the men had used their clubs to beat the people sleeping
there — mostly market women from the country, who were guarding their
precious merchandise, and the usual complement of beggars. The men had
chased them off, then carefully, methodically poured out their gasoline
and torched the building. The enormous blaze roared until dawn, reddening
the night sky and covering the capital in a pall of smoke that reeked
of burned bananas and charred meat. At dawn, one could see amid the smoking
rubble scores of beggars and market women staggering about, moaning and
wailing as they picked through the tons of blackened, stinking food. I
watched a frail old man probe around, then straighten up and let out a
shout: he held up a piece of charred meat in triumph before stuffing it
into his mouth as his colleagues raced toward him through the rubble.

A woman with a red kerchief on her head pulled something from the black
waste and rose up straight, showing me what had once been her prized hen.
By now, others had gathered around me, hoping that this white man with
his notebook might be moved by their litany of losses and somehow make
it right.

"I lost some beans and some bananas."

"I lost three chickens."

"I lost some beef."

A little white-whiskered man, in bluejeans and a white shirt, cut short
the voices. "Yesterday, many people went to bed hungry, but today
we'll have food," he said. He held up a burned piece of beef and
gestured, grinning, toward the black landscape. "There's food in
Haiti now, because things are starting to boil."

IN an earlier predawn darkness, on February
7, 1986, Jean-Claude Duvalier took the wheel of his BMW and, with his
elegant mulatto wife, Michèle Bennett, coolly smoking a cigarette at his
side, drove to Franí§ois Duvalier International Airport, boarded an American
military jet, and fled to an opulent exile in the South of France — there
to rejoin an expatriated fortune estimated at more than two hundred and
fifty million dollars (equivalent to more than Haiti's annual budget).

For fifteen years, he had ruled the land, and his father fourteen before
him. It was Dr. Franí§ois Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, who had painstakingly
created the intricate dictatorial system that came to be called Duvalierism,
and installed himself at its apex, as President for life. The engine of
Duvalierism was the Tontons Macoutes, a "volunteer" militia
that was part mass political party, part paramilitary force, part extortion
ring, and part storm troop. In their tens of thousands — no one knew
the exact number — the Macoutes, wearing dark glasses, red neckerchiefs,
and blue denim, covered the land, searching out any potential threat,
be it a student with contacts among the exiled opposition, a merchant
reluctant to surrender a kickback, or, most threatening of all, a restive
Army officer pondering a coup.

In 1971, Papa Doc died in office; by one count, he had survived eight
invasions and attempted coups and at last departed the Palace only, as
he had vowed, "to the salute of cannon." His power at the end
had been such that, having obliterated all opposition, he could install
as his successor a slow-witted nineteen-year-old distinguished only by
his great bulk and his glassy stare — and bequeath to him, by sheer force
of will and the fear evoked by his name, a reign that endured a year longer
than his own.

But after a decade of Jean-Claude's rule in this impoverished land — the
poorest in the hemisphere and one of the poorest on earth, where nine
people in ten live on less than a hundred and eighty dollars a year, where
four in five cannot read, and where the life expectancy barely exceeds
fifty years — the economy had begun to spiral even further downward. And
in the fifteenth year of Jean-Claude's rule the young dictator came under
attack.

The explosion took place in November, 1985. In the desolate port city
of Gonaí¯ves, during a peaceful demonstration against food shortages, Duvalier's
security forces killed four schoolchildren, and those deaths — four murdered
Haitians out of the tens of thousands killed over the past three decades — unleashed
something uncontrollable. Overnight, the four children were transformed
into martyrs. Around the country, young Haitians were suddenly marching,
students refusing to attend classes; Catholic priests were publicly urging
them on, with Radio Soleil, the Church station, serving as the revolt's
nervous system. Duvalier's Macoutes responded by shooting demonstrators,
and the regime moved to imprison some prominent people, and to close Radio
Soleil. But American officials, who under Jean-Claude had become the dominant
foreign presence in the country, reminded the President that their aid
during this difficult time would depend, as always, on his "human
rights" comportment. And the Army officers, sensing the weakness
of the regime and the ambivalence of the Americans, seemed to be holding
back, biding their time. The young dictator, unsure of himself, wavered;
he was not the man his father was, had never shown the same mastery of
the techniques of massive, unremitting terror. And he had allowed the
Duvalierist political base — built on black-power nationalism and anti-Americanism—to
weaken and fragment. Over the years, the rich and pampered Jean-Claude
had become, to the disgust of many of Papa Doc's old noiriste henchmen,
an ally of the mulattoes, and had grown increasingly dependent on the
Americans and their aid. He enjoyed the money and the parties, the perquisites
of power, but when the moment came he had little stomach for the fight — for
fully unleashing the repressive apparatus his father had carefully constructed.

When the people began to march, he hesitated, reshuffled advisers, fired
ministers; the Americans applied pressure, and soon many of those he had
jailed were released, and Radio Soleil was reopened. The Tontons Macoutes
were eager to crush the revolt, and strained against the leash, but they
were mostly held back. Then, while Haitians filled the streets, and opposition
roadblocks began to spring up, the Americans gave a final push: in a critical
damning gesture at the end of January, 1986, Reagan Administration officials
announced they would refuse to certify to Congress that the Duvalier regime
was improving in its respect for human rights — a decision that would cut
off American aid.

The ominous meaning of the gesture was clear.
"We told them," an American diplomat said later, "we weren't
going to certify unless they did things — start political parties, release
prisoners, keep Radio Soleil open — they really couldn't do and still
keep power." Soon afterward, the American Ambassador spelled matters
out in a chat with the Haitian Foreign Minister: The United States preferred
President Duvalier's early departure, provided he left the country in
the hands of the military. ("Duvalier saw the handwriting on the
wall," an American diplomat put it later. "But the U.S.. helped
translate it for him.") On February 6th, the Ambassador was summoned
to the Palace, where the exhausted dictator inquired whether an American
plane could be found for him and his family. The envoy, thinking of the
difficult "transition" ahead, had a request of his own: Could
the President do something to "neutralize" his Macoutes, to
prevent a spree of killing after his departure? Duvalier promised to put
them under the control of the Army; then, at the urging of his Foreign
Minister, he dictated the names of six men he would leave in his place
to rule the exploding country. ("He left the way he wanted to leave,"
the diplomat said. "Otherwise he might not have left at all. He still
had repressive mechanisms at his disposal.") A few hours later, Duvalier
was gone.

It fell to General Henri Namphy, a stocky, bullnecked, moon-faced mulatto,
who had been the armed forces' chief of staff under Duvalier and now became
the senior member of the hastily formed junta, to take control during
the parenthèse that would follow — the "parenthesis" of disorder,
political jockeying, and sporadic violence that traditionally bridged
the fall of one Haitian ruler and the rise of the next. Such crises had
punctuated the story of independent Haiti, a span of a hundred and eighty-two
years during which thirty-five men had come to power and ruled the land,
then left it in their various ways — one executed, one a suicide, two assassinated,
one blown up along with the National Palace, six dead in office, eighteen
violently overthrown. "A revolution in Haiti," ex-President Francois
Légitime (overthrown in 1889) explained to readers of the London Herald
in 1911, "does not have the same meaning as it would have here. It
is our only way of changing administrations. Here you have an election;
down there they have a revolution." On February 7, 1986, the latest
parenthèse began in jubilation. The street in front of the National Palace
overflowed with thousands of delirious Haitians — Haitians dancing, singing,
swigging rum, honking their horns, abandoning themselves to a tumultuous
national celebration. Amid it all stood General Namphy, a gruff officer
who had served virtually his entire career under the Duvaliers but who,
despite his position as chief of staff, had held little real power — for
it was a tenet of Duvalierism to keep the Army fragmented, divided, and
thus able to recognize as its one real master only the dictator himself.
It was over this ill-trained, ill-led force of seven thousand men that
General Namphy now uncertainly ruled, and through it proposed; to rule
the six million citizens of the newly christened Haiti Libérée.

Soon after the dictator's flight, Haitians heard General Namphy announce
that his regime would insure a "firm, just, and good transition to
democracy," heard him vow (in his ferocious, shouting speechmaking style, the only way Namphy could overcome a lifelong stutter) that his
transitional government would help "build a new Haiti, based on reason,
social justice, tolerances and freedom." They heard the American
Secretary of State, proclaim that the United States remained "committed to the development of democratic government and respect for fundamental
human rights in...Haiti," and they saw the Americans follow through
by first restoring the crucial foreign aid and then more than doubling
it.

Yet no sooner had Namphy taken power than assertions and demands and
accusations began sprouting everywhere like weeds, spreading across
the aqua and salmon walls of Port-au-Prince in a lush growth of misshapen
letters and misspelled words. The graffiti was dominated by one idea,
which instantly became the presiding ideological concept of post-Duvalier
Haiti's bamboche démocratique, or "democratic spree" — an inescapable,
insistent demand to déchoukay .

Déchoukay is a Creole word meaning to uproot, and during the next two
years uprooting would loom as the guiding principle of the Haitian opposition. These calls to uproot, to rip out, soon became the ground over
which the various factions of the opposition battled one another, thereby exposing the central paradox of the 'parenthèses': the measure of a
leader's credibility, and thus his mass popularity, had quickly become
his vow to "uproot" the existing system — the very system that
still controlled Haiti's governmental apparatus and that alone, could
give that leader power.

Having déchoukayed Jean-Claude Duvalier, his hated wife, and all their
despised, decadent hangers-on, the Haitian people pushed further: not
only the omnipresent Duvalierist slogans, the photographs, and the streets
named for the Duvaliers but also the Macoutes, the high officials, the
mid level bureaucrats, the collaborators — all traces of the regime that
for thirty years had dominated the country, had co-opted, obliterated
or exiled its national culture, and had insinuated itself into every interstice
of national life — were to be instantly destroyed.

Perhaps the most memorable image of Operation Déchoukaj was the uprooting
of the Macoutes: angry crowds of poor Haitians surrounding an unlucky
militiaman — usually a frightened, pleading man, by now in civilian clothes,
having hurriedly discarded his blue denim uniform — and beating him to
death with sticks, or stoning him to death, or covering him with gasoline
and burning him alive, and leaving his remains lying in the sun to be
further abused, or else parading them triumphantly through the neighborhood.

Those who opposed the uprooting would be uprooted in their turn. For
had not the people uprooted Duvalier? Had they not accomplished what had
come to be called la révolution sans armes? Operation Déchoukaj,it was
said again and again, more and more insistently, during the first months
of the parenthèse, had only just begun.

Letting the violence take its course was the officers' attempt to satisfy
the overwhelming political emotion of that time: the people's desire for
revenge. "I stood and marvelled at the justice of the people,"
Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, an influential priest and proponent of
the "unarmed revolution," told me passionately.

But how, I asked, could he, a priest, a moral leader of the Haitian people,
call such acts "justice"?

"Our consciences should be clear," Father Aristide said heatedly.
"These Macoutes were Satan, Satan incarnate." And there was
still great great danger, six weeks after the flight of Duvalier,"
he said. "The people must continue to show how strong they are, how
strong they can be! They know about the Duvalierist presence in the Cabinet,
the presence of Duvalier in the public administration, in the Army, even
in the Church. It is not enough that those people say they've changed
their mentalité. They are Duvalierists! And the people will remove them,
one by one, as they did Duvalier."

What mattered was not just that General Namphy and the others in the
junta — with the sole exception of Gerard Gourgue, a lawyer and human
rights activist — had served Duvalier in the past. Or even that, after
a dictatorship of three decades, everyone with any authority in the government,
in the public administration, and in the Army was, at least by the loosest
definition, a Duvalierist. What mattered was that the people thought they
had made a revolution, and demanded justice as their fair reward. But
justice was the one thing that the officers could not give them, for in
their view what had brought down Duvalier was their coup d'état, and it
was a coup based on a compromise: Duvalier would leave quietly if his
"associates" were protected; the Macoutes would let the Army
assume power quietly if their leaders were protected, if their rank and
file were permitted to fade away without pursuit or prosecution.

So this became "the compromise with power that weighs on the country
to this day," as a Haitian political scientist and politician named
Leslie F. Manigat put it. For not only did the officers stand aside while
the "justice of the people" was administered to those "little
Macoutes" who, of the thousands of Macoutes in flight, were unlucky
enough to get caught; they also looked the other way while a number of
notorious officials made their escapes. Mme. Max Adolphe, the leader of
the Macoutes and a onetime commandant of the infamous Fort Dimanche prison,
disappeared, rumored to have escaped the country disguised as a nun or,
in another account, secreted in a crate of mangoes. (Her pleasant split-level
on the Pétionville road, with its signature stone shark grimacing open-mouthed
in the swimming pool, was thoroughly déchoukayed.) Albert Pierre, Jean-Claude's
former secret-police chief, popularly known as Ti Boulé (Little Flame),
because of his preferred method of torture, was allowed in late February
to leave the country and take refuge in Brazil — an official move by the
government which elicited general indignation, with even justice Minister
Gourgue calling it "shocking and offensive to the nation."

Shortly afterward, Gourgue resigned from the first junta, becoming for
a time the most popular political leader in the country and, having forced
Namphy to reconstitute his tottering regime, earning the General's undying
enmity. Within a few weeks of Duvalier's departure, demonstrators had
begun to shout, "Down with Namphy!," and within two months the
slogans of the gathering opposition had taken shape: the interim government
was "Duvalierism Without Duvalier," which meant "The Revolution
Has Not Yet Finished."

THROUGHOUT the exhilarating first months
of the parenthèse, each day seemed to bring a new demonstration or strike,
the announcement of a new political party or mass organization or human-rights
group, the christening of a new newspaper or magazine. Each flight from
New York or Paris or Miami brought a celebrated dissident returning with
a bit of Duvalierist history — a family massacred, colleagues executed,
months spent in Duvalier's torture chambers — and a score to settle with
the Duvalierists. The counter-elite, so long exiled, had returned to fight
for power.

For three decades, the Haitian political world had been fallow and moribund;
with a few exceptions, those politicians and intellectuals who had not
been killed had long since fled. "Under Duvalier, if you had any
talent or ambition and wanted to stay in Haiti, you had two alternatives,"
a Frenchwoman long resident in Port-au-Prince told me. "You could
let yourself become totally corrupted or you could be killed. That was
it." A large part of the intelligentsia chose exile. Although pressure
from the Carter Administration had brought a brief but hesitant political
opening (slammed shut within days of Reagan's election), by 1986 one in
every six Haitians was living abroad, including he overwhelming majority
of professionals: more Haitian economists and technicians were working
in Africa than in Haiti, and many more Haitian professors were teaching
outside their country than within it.

One such professor was Leslie Manigat, who had built a distinguished
academic career studying the workings of the Haitian political crises.
That career had begun as early as 1953, when Manigat, a twenty-three year-old
Sorbonne student, dissected the first Haitian parenthèse in his thesis,
"The Liquidation of Saint-Domingue as a French Colony"; it continued
after the young scholar returned to Haiti to take up a position in the
Foreign Ministry. Then, in 1957, his career really took off, for in that
year, at long last — after six years of corrupt rule by Paul Magloire,
a high-living black officer in the pocket of Haiti's mulatto elite —
Dr. Franí§ois Duvalier had emerged from hiding and, after a chaotic nine-month
parenthèse in which five governments rose and fell, was elected, with
the Army's help, President of the Republic. Dr. Duvalier was a black nationalist,
a noiriste -- a "soft-spoken country doctor" who "knew
the people." And Manigat, brilliant, energetic, ambitious, and singled
out as one of Papa Doc's young favorites in those exciting times, shortly
became the Foreign Ministry's Director of Political Affairs, and, at the
same time, the founder of Haiti's National School of Advanced International
Studies.

But after just a few years of Duvalier's increasingly bloody "political
revolution" the inevitable falling out came (over Professor Manigat's
support of a student strike), and there followed in 1961 the weeks spent
in a "forced visit to the Duvalierist prisons" (as the professor
jokingly described it later), then asylum with his family in the Argentine
Embassy, and finally, a safe-conduct having been grudgingly granted, years
of celebrated exile. Across three continents, the honors followed one
upon another, at the University of Paris; at the University of the West
Indies, in Trinidad; and then at Simón Bolí­var University, in Caracas.

Through it all, he continued to publish prolifically — an outpouring
of books and monographs and articles. But the key texts orbited around
a fixed point, and returned to one overriding goal: to analyze minutely
virtually every major conjoncture (as he called these periods of crisis)
in Haitian history. And in almost all of these fascinating, exhaustive
studies he deftly inserted, like an interconnecting thread, one version
or another of a favorite Manigat dictum: that the political crisis might
be considered "a moment of nudity, propitious for applying the stethoscope
to the social body."

Now, for this latest "moment of nudity," Professor Manigat
could at last be present. As the leader of the seven-year-old Rally of
National Progressive Democrats, he had become one of dozens of Haitian
Presidential candidates walking a tightrope between the anti-government
popular movement, which claimed to voice the sentiments of "the people,"
and the widely hated but still all-powerful officers.

He had expected a triumphant welcome, and there was no lack of cheering
supporters at the airport. But the press was strangely absent. It was
only later that he discovered what had happened; for it was April 26th,
the anniversary of one of Papa Doc's bloodiest days of terror twenty-three
years before. Outside Fort Dimanche, the opposition had held a large demonstration,
and Namphy's men had fired into the crowd, leaving six dead and a hundred
wounded.

So it was into a world of confrontation, heightened rhetoric, and frenzied
political activity that Manigat returned. After the shootings, the country
erupted again, and various popular leaders demanded that the Namphy government
relinquish power. General Namphy had announced no plans for elections,
had brought no Macoutes to trial (indeed, it was widely believed that
scores of them had been integrated into his Army), and had done little
to bring about the kind of wholesale reform that the people were loudly
demanding. On the contrary, the Army — its command structure wholly unaltered
from what it had been in the last days of Duvalier's rule — seemed quite
willing to shoot Haitians down in the streets.

In what had been a political and intellectual desert, the floodgates
had opened, and suddenly politics had become a growth industry. Overnight,
a small, dead country had been transformed, in the words of the Haitian
sociologist Laí«nnec Hurbon, into "an immense social and political
laboratory."

"The crucial, urgent task here is to
build political institutions — real, lasting political institutions,"
Rosny Desroches, a schoolmaster who had been named the interim government's
Minister of Education, told me. "I'm talking about the parties and
the unions that will stabilize our political life. When you don't have
political parties, for example, that a President can lead after he leaves
office, he wants to stay President forever."

As Desroches spoke, parties and committees and groups were indeed being
created, but in fantastic profusion. Acronyms — the MIDH, the KID, the LHID,
the PAIN — were flourishing, as any Haitian of note or weight seemed to
be starting a political party or a mass organization or a political committee
or a magazine. It was all an exciting venture in the rhetoric of politics,
politics as full-dress theatre, operatic politics, politics by declamation:
an honored — if, by definition, sporadic — Haitian tradition. But the
work of coalition-building, of the subjugation of personal ambition so
necessary to a party, was mostly absent. With one important exception,
the political parties were built largely around single personalities.
When it finally came time to hold an election, thirty-five candidates
applied to run for President.

The overriding role of personal ambition and the resulting factionalization
were nothing new in the world of the Haitian parenthèse. "The most
striking feature of the Haitian system is the intensity of political activity,"
Professor Manigat had written in 1964, observing Franí§ois Duvalier's Haiti
from exile in Washington. "Everything is political and may become
involved in the struggle for power.... The reputation earned by an engineer
in his special field is regarded as a political trump. The prestige that
a professor gains among his students may represent a political threat
to the government.... Such is the encroachment of politics on all aspects
of life that if a man does not go into politics, politics itself comes
to him."

In the months after Jean-Claude Duvalier's fall, amid an unruly urban
mass population, a frightened and insecure elite, and a disaffected and
isolated peasantry, Haiti Liberée's political spectrum began to take shape.
At one end was the government, run by the Army and managed largely by
the same corrupt administration that had served Duvalier, with a few respected
civilians brought in to fill Cabinet posts.

Exerting a strong influence on the government were the harder-line Duvalierists
(powerful businessmen who had benefited from the regime; retired officers;
influential former Duvalier ministers), who sought to crush any move toward
political reform by working through their connections within the Army
and the government, by paying for strikes and demonstrations to pressure
the regime publicly, and by employing the now underground Macoutes to
attack and disrupt the opposition — all the while remaining in the background
themselves.

At the other end of the spectrum were the mass organizations, what Professor
Manigat called "the counter-power in the streets": hundreds of
loosely organized groups that, depending on the occasion, could mount
a demonstration in a matter of hours or minutes, and were headed by "popular
leaders," many of whom had been in exile during the Duvalier years.
It was impossible to estimate the "permanent" membership of
these organizations; they thrived on the growing distrust of the Namphy
government and the disdain most people felt for the "traditional"
politicians. By mounting strikes and demonstrations, these groups pushed
for the resignation of certain "Macoute" members of the government — carrying on the process of uprooting Duvalierism which Father Aristide
called "peeling the onion, layer by layer."

Caught in between were the various "traditional" politicians
— les candidats, as they became somewhat derisively known — all of whom
wanted desperately to be President and thus found themselves forced to
scurry back and forth, denouncing the government during times of crisis,
in order to curry favor with the "popular movements," but striving
always to avoid alienating the Army officers who still controlled the
transition.

In June, General Namphy, warning that the country was "on the edge
of anarchy," at last announced an electoral calendar, thereby pleasing
the Americans and the candidates but leaving most of the popular groups,
who believed a fair election, was impossible under Namphy, unappeased.
When it came time for the first event — the election of a constituent assembly
the following fall — fewer than one in twenty Haitians stepped forward
to vote.

Instead, the people turned their attention to a menacing image: that
of several of Papa Doc's old henchmen smiling at a press conference as
they announced the establishment of a neo-Duvalierist party.

Protesting Haitians poured into the streets in the largest demonstrations
yet, and two weeks later the new party was forced to disband.

Meanwhile, in the red-carpeted hall of the Palais Législatif, sixty-one
forgotten delegates had begun to debate a new constitution. Almost before
anyone noticed, they had produced an extraordinary document: a constitution
that, in its litany of absurd and brilliant and, finally, Machiavellian
provisions, must have surprised the people of Haiti as much as it surprised
the government, which had thought that everything was under firm control
and now found itself presented with a populist and wildly popular document
that stripped the officers of the one power that was the only power in
the Haiti of the parenthèse — the power to conduct elections. On March
29, 1987, the constitution went to the voters, and this time more than
a million Haitians turned out, and more than ninety-nine per cent voted
yes.

Two key provisions led to this astonishing vote. The first created an
independent Provisional Electoral Council, which would write the Electoral
Law and oversee the coming elections — that is, count the votes. The second
stipulated that for ten years no "architects of the dictatorship"
could be candidates for public office. In a country where almost all power
had depended, in the end, on the government, the Duvalierists — who,
rich and prosperous, now saw themselves with so many enemies and so much
to lose — were to be stripped of power entirely. The constitution had become
a mechanism to de-Duvalierize and de-Macoutize the country; it had become
a version of Father Aristide's unarmed revolution — a version made solely
of paper. The opposition, in the guise of the constitution, had taken
over the official process.

In June, the Namphy government made a clumsy move to steal the key electoral
power back, by claiming that it alone had the authority to supervise
the elections. Once again, people poured into the streets, and this time
Namphy's troops shot them by the score. After a week of protests, the
General backed down. But the opposition, hoping to build on its victory,
now issued the call "Raché manyok": "Pull up the manioc!"
or, in the full phrase, "Pull up the manioc and leave the field clean!" — in other words, overthrow the government.

It was a critical miscalculation. In the days that followed, more demonstrators
died in the streets; but though the Army had been there to push out Duvalier,
there was no one to push out the Army. The Americans, after warning pointedly
against any "perversion of the democratic process," nonetheless
reaffirmed their support for the Namphy government. When the smoke cleared,
General Namphy remained in place, but he was now deeply antagonistic toward
the Provisional Electoral Council and its vaunted "independence."
Like the Duvalierists, he viewed the Council as a vehicle for failed revolutionaries
to put themselves in power.

In August, a leader of a minor party, campaigning in the countryside,
was hacked to death by angry peasants; someone had denounced him as a
Communist, a word that in Haiti for thirty years had been a synonym for
"devil." In October, a well-known Presidential candidate, an
exile recently returned from Manhattan, stood before the Port-au-Prince
police station, his lawyer's gown draped over one arm, and began a speech
demanding the release of a prisoner within. Suddenly, two men burst through
the crowd of reporters, and one of them placed a pistol at the candidate's
temple and fired. No charges were filed.

On November 2nd, the Provisional
Electoral Council announced a list of twenty-three "acceptable"
Presidential candidates — thereby in effect disallowing the twelve others,
on the ground that they had, "by excess of zeal," been architects
of the dictatorship. But, having circumvented the Army, the Council was
left with only the constitution to protect it; and, as a Haitian proverb
has it, "constitutions are made of paper, bayonets are made of iron."

Hours after the Council's decision was announced, a group of armed men
blocked off the Rue Pavée, a main street within a few hundred feet of
the police station and the Army headquarters, and set about ransacking
and then burning the Council building. The men seemed in no particular
hurry; indeed, they seemed determined to be thorough — some witnesses said
they used a flamethrower. Neither the police nor the soldiers lifted a
hand.

Thus as Haiti, for the first time in thirty years, moved toward
elections, it became increasingly apparent that power had assumed two
distinct forms: the heretofore mute power of numbers, who saw in the elections
a chance for change; and the power of those with guns and influence, who
saw in them a direct threat.

NOW, six days before the election, I left
the smoking ruin of the Marché Salomon and drove to Jean-Claude Bajeux's
Ecumenical Center for Human Rights, on the bougainvillea-lined Rue de
Marguerites. Bajeux was a key figure in the Front National de Concertation,
or National Togetherness Front, a moderate-left party that was really
not a party at all but an ad-hoc coalition joining KONAKOM — a loosely organized
congeries of unions, peasant groups, mass organizations, and Church groups
that had emerged from the Congress of Democratic Movements earlier that
year — to the small Socialist Party and several other party-like organizations.
It was, in short, a popular front, and its foot soldiers were the lay
workers and the priests of the Ti Legliz, the Liberation Church. Since
the Front, unlike traditional Haitian political parties, was formed from
the bottom up, it seemed to many Haitians the organization most likely
to be able to marshal countrywide, grass-roots support, and also, crucially,
to have its people present at all or most of the thousands of isolated
polling places.

"We don't know what will happen from moment to moment," Bajeux
told me, leaning forward in his chair, his hands tightly clasped — a
tall, thin, light-skinned man with a round bald spot that looked almost
like a tonsure, making him resemble the friar he had been in another life.
"We don't know if the Army will back the terrorists or will move
to neutralize them. They know them, of course—know who did this, know
their cars. But so far the Army is like this." He crossed his arms.
"The soldiers want to prove that the Electoral Council is unable
to conduct organized elections. In the streets, the people say the Army
is doing this; I am less categorical — I say the Army is letting the Macoutes
do it. If the Army doesn't act, if it doesn't arrest some people, it means
they want the disorder, they don't want the elections to go forward."
Bajeux paused. "It's time for the Americans to act. It's time for
the Embassy to" — he clenched both hands, thumbs down, turned them
"tighten the screws."

And if they didn't? lf the Americans didn't put pressure on the Army?

"If the Army doesn't arrest anyone before this evening, they" —
the Macoutes — "will burn other things, kill other people, maybe
some of us."

At that moment, as if on some absurdly well-timed
cue, shots rang out in the street outside — two or three single shots,
then a burst of automatic fire — followed by screaming and yelling, then
the screech of tires. Bajeux's eyes widened slightly, and he looked at
me: the shots seemed to come from just outside the door. But almost at
once he gently dropped his hands in a movement of resignation and rose
slowly to his feet. He led his secretary and another guest to a little
room in the back of the office, then turned and sat down. "Now we
wait," he said softly.

It was in 1964, when he was a young member of the Fathers of the Holy
Spirit, that Bajeux had run afoul of Papa Doc. The dictator had summarily
expelled the entire Jesuit order; he was then in full raging Kulturkampf
against the Catholic Church — terrorizing the largely French and Canadian
clergy and defying the Vatican, which excommunicated him. (His victory
in this struggle was one of Papa Doc's proudest accomplishments — and
also constituted his poisoned legacy, for the nationalized Church made
use of its enhanced prestige to encourage the revolt that overthrew his
son.) Father Bajeux signed a letter to his bishop protesting the expulsion
of the Jesuits; the bishop turned it over to the dictator, and the young
priest was expelled to the Dominican Republic, where he began ministering
to Haitian exiles. His mother and brothers and sisters continued to live
in Port-au-Prince, in a pretty, pale-orange gingerbread house on the Rue
Berne.

In Haiti, that summer of 1964 was a climax of the period's turmoil and
terror. In August, thirteen young exiles invaded in the south. Swarms
of Tontons Macoutes and soldiers hunted them down; two were taken alive
and sent to the capital, where they were tied to stakes in the National
Cemetery and — before huge crowds of children — executed in a televised
ceremony.

Earlier that summer — about the time Father Bajeux was opening his mission
in Santo Domingo — another exile had led a hit-and-run operation over the
Dominican border. "There was some confusion, because the radio talked
about both events, and my name came out," Bajeux recalled. "In
Port-au-Prince, some people told my mother she was in danger. She went
to see the secretary to the papal nuncio, who told her that everyone in
Haiti was threatened, so he didn't see why she should be specially threatened.
She went to the French Ambassador, who told her the same thing, and said,
`Really, I can guarantee that nothing will happen to you; there is nothing
to fear.' That was at eleven in the morning. At eleven that night, they
all disappeared — my mother, two sisters, and two brothers. And the house
stayed open — the doors open, all the lights on — for a month.' "

It was more than two decades — time spent working and teaching in the Dominican
Republic, Mexico, and Puerto Rico — before Bajeux stepped off a plane in
Port-au-Prince, a few days after Jean-Claude Duvalier boarded his, and
returned to his mother's house.

"It was still there, but ruined, destroyed," Bajeux said. "You
see, after the house had stayed open a month, some Macoutes came and occupied
it. And it was only twenty-two years after, when I arrived in February,
that I put them out. I came into the house and I did like this" —
he clapped sharply three times — "and they said, `We were waiting
for you. We knew you were going to arrive.' And the Macoutes handed me
their papers, one of which said, `This house was given to us by Mme. Max
Adolphe.' I heard later how at police headquarters my family were beaten
up, raped. Other prisoners saw them at Fort Dimanche, but after that..."

Now, twenty-three years later, the Macoutes were still here, and there
was shooting outside his door. In the street, I found scores of people
still running in panic, but the gunmen had sped off; a Haitian friend
of mine who had been waiting at Bajeux's gate told me that there were
three or four of them in a small white car, plus a young man on a brown-and-white
motorcycle. They had stopped in front of the gate and jumped from the
car — one man brandishing an Uzi, the others drawing pistols — and fired
into the air. Then they had raced down the street and turned the corner.

As my friend and I drove toward that corner, we could see a commotion
on the Avenue Jean Paul II: perhaps thirty or forty tough-looking, muscular
young men, in T-shirts and slacks, all with clubs or rocks or machetes
in hand, were surging down the busy street, bellowing furiously, swinging
their clubs, thrashing people who hadn't run away fast enough. Some of
the gang were throwing rocks through store windows and smashing windshields
on parked cars, and, as we approached, driving slowly, a young black man
raised a jagged chunk of concrete high above his head and, screaming wildly,
was on the point of heaving it through the windshield until he saw I was
white, whereupon he shouted for me to back up, to stay away or take the
consequences.

The gang moved rapidly on, sweeping down the thoroughfare in a few minutes
of shouting and tumult, and then melted away, leaving behind a deserted
street littered with smashed cars and broken glass from the storefronts — one of which belonged to the Movement to Install Democracy in Haiti,
the party of Marc Bazin, a longtime World Bank official and a leading
Presidential candidate. Bazin, an articulate economist, had led a highly
publicized crusade against corruption during a brief stint as Jean-Claude
Duvalier's Finance Minister, in 1982 (the dictator had fired him after
five months), and was popularly thought to be "the American candidate,"
or, sometimes, "the Haitian Kennedy," for his good looks and
dynamic style. But the car-borne terrorists seemed no more impressed by
World Bank conservatives than by leftist intellectuals; they had taken
care to spray his headquarters with gunfire.

In the distance I heard shouting and the sound of tires, and within minutes
the streets leading to the wealthy suburb of Pétionville were jammed with
people trying to escape what had suddenly become a "hot day"
in town (a reverse and more frenzied version of the procession of Mercedeses,
BMWs, and Peugeots that early each morning dropped the kids off at school
and brought the fathers to their government offices). Farther downtown,
merchants were pulling down their shop grates. On one main corner of the
Avenue John Brown, on the way up to Pétionville, I found a tire and some
other rubble burning — a hastily built barricade — and was told by several
bystanders that a man wielding a rifle had appeared suddenly, chased people
away, thrown the barricade together, then disappeared; and, they added,
almost as an afterthought, the man had been wearing a dress.

ON the Route de Delmas, in the middle of
the ugly commercial clutter that was the main legacy of Jean-Claude's
vaunted Decade of Development, I found the new headquarters of the Electoral
Council, where, behind sandbags and credentials checks and a mandatory
search at a metal gate, there was an air of embattled chaos. "We
have no security whatsoever," René Belance, the public-relations
director, told me. "Before, we had two policemen, but now the government
has pulled them. When we ask for security, they don't answer. Last night,
we were attacked again. Did you see? There are sixteen bullet holes downstairs."

Through a window I could see two young men shoveling gravel into canvas
sacks — more sandbags to protect the building. Behind Belance, volunteers
were perched on a stepladder, working to install a new drop ceiling in
what until a few weeks before had been a factory. Council officials, mostly
young men neatly dressed in sports shirts, hurried back and forth among
the various offices — one each for the nine Council members, plus special
rooms marked "Computers," "Public Relations," "Press."
In the center of the main room, journalists milled about, waiting for
yellow press passes. The foreign reporters were treated with an efficiency
— a deference, even — unusual for Haiti but befitting what the Council
recognized as their central role: with the increased pace of the killings
and burnings, the foreign press and observers had become a lifeline for
the isolated Council, carrying its message (who could resist the appeal
of "free and fair elections" in Haiti?) to the outside world.

In a small office, Louis Roy, a white-haired, distinguished-looking mulatto
physician of seventy-one, was telling a group of journalists, "It
is those who don't want the elections to come off who have the force,
who have the ammunition, who have the
money to buy people and send them
into the street, as they did this morning." During the early years
of Franí§ois Duvalier, Roy had served as the head of Haiti's Red Cross,
bravely protesting the dictator's illegal arrests until one day someone
tossed a bomb into his front yard, almost killing his young son. Roy spent
the remainder of the Duvalier years in Montreal, and returned in the
spring of 1986 to play a key part in writing the constitution. "It
is not only a question of scaring people so they don't vote," he
was saying. "It is that we may not be able to send all the material
to the polls. For example, today we had fifty-six students-volunteers who
were supposed to pick up the ballots from the printer. But because of
the situation they didn't show up."

In a mountainous country with very few roads and the great majority of
the people scattered in inaccessible villages, many of which can be reached
only on foot or by donkey, six thousand polling places had to be supplied
with ballots enough to offer three million eligible voters a chance to
vote for one of the twenty-three Presidential candidates. And, since four
out of five of those voters were illiterate, it was essential that ballots
printed with clear photographs of the candidates were delivered to all
the polling places. Desperate, the Council had tried to rent helicopters
from private companies in the United States but failed. "No helicopter
owner wants to rent his helicopter in this situation," Roy said.

Outside, volunteers were loading cartons of ballots onto trucks. As
I was examining one cargo, I was warned off by a young man. "It is
not the time for that sort of curiosity," he told me dryly. And why
should they not be suspicious — paranoid, even? The Council was isolated,
unarmed, unprotected, and, as Sunday drew nearer, the government's attitude
became increasingly clear: the people wanted the Army out of the election,
and out of the election the Army would be; the election was the Council's
business — let it try to carry the thing off by itself, with only the
help and protection of its foreign friends, if it could. All around the
Council headquarters were inspiring signs of its foreign support. New
computers to count the votes — on which earnest young volunteers were furiously
practicing — had been donated by the French. Gray plastic ballot boxes — eighteen
thousand of them — had been donated by the Canadians, who had also given
gas lanterns to light the polling places in the many towns and villages
without electricity. Registration forms had come from the Venezuelans.

And, of course, there was money. About a million dollars, Roy said, had
come from the Japanese. But the money to pay for the printing and the
pens and paper, the banners and posters, as well as the picture books
showing how to vote in easy cartoon lessons, and the television and radio
commercials and cassette tapes that explained the procedures in careful
Creole, and for the many other things needed to stage an election in a
land that hadn't seen one in three decades — including now the sandbags
and heavy steel sheets nailed in place over Roy's windows, which, as he
proudly pointed out, had already been dented by a burst of gunfire — the
bulk of all this money had come from the Americans. Those same Americans
who had supplied the military plane that carried off Jean-Claude Duvalier,
who had doubled their foreign aid to help Haiti through the difficult
"transition" that followed, had now become the main backers
of Haiti's democratic election, having donated something on the order
of eight million dollars. Small wonder that Jean-Claude Bajeux was waiting
impatiently for the Embassy to "tighten the screws"; the election —
like the tottering Haitian economy — was largely an American-financed production.

WE have spoken with the government about
the lack of security," an American diplomat said on Tuesday. "And,
remember, an Army or police unit did show up at Bazin's headquarters yesterday."
The diplomat, precise and expressionless in his light-blue cotton suit,
was giving a "not for attribution" briefing to a roomful of
reporters assembled at AID headquarters, a sprawling, pale-orange building
on the Boulevard Harry Truman, not far from the city's harbor. Almost
all pronouncements from American officials in Haiti were not for attribution.
"Our actions have such a magnified effect here, mainly because of
the weight Haitians give them," a senior envoy had explained to me.
"You don't need to do or say much, so you have to be very, very careful.
A little muscle twitch over here gets magnified many, many times."

As for the identity of "the terrorists," the diplomat was now
saying cautiously, "I assume we are talking about people associated
with some of the rejected candidates." That seemed reasonable, I
thought, remembering the second of the bodies I had seen that morning,
a plump, shoeless corpse that had been left like a bouquet in front of
the Institution Secondaire Gérard Gourgue. In all likelihood, the victim
was thoroughly uninterested in politics and had simply made the mistake
of venturing out on the streets at night during a difficult time, when
people "associated with some of the rejected candidates" stumbled
across him, shot him in the stomach, heaved him into the back of their
jeep, and dumped him in front of the candidate's door—just far enough
from a "Gí‰RARD GOURGUE PRESIDENT DE TOUS LES HAITIENS" poster
to make their message clear without overdoing the sarcasm.

"Essentially, the kind of violence we've seen shows the strength
of terrorist-type actions," the American diplomat was saying. "That
is, a few people can cause a great deal of disruption." Then, in
response to a question about Army involvement, he said, "No, I have
seen no concrete evidence of it."

The person in the best position to have such evidence, of course, would
have been the victim. As it was, Army jeeps passed by the corpse two or
three times while I was present, though the soldiers did not bother to
stop, contenting themselves with exaggeratedly fierce looks directed at
the assembled bystanders and photographers. It seemed likely that the
man would lie there in the sun all day, or longer, in what one bystander
referred to as "the old Papa Doc way — leave them lying there to teach
people a lesson." No Haitian, certainly, would move to touch him.
("Are you just going to leave him lying there?" I heard an exasperated
American reporter demand of a teacher in the Gourgue school. He had to
repeat the question several times before the gaping young man managed
to stammer back, "Well, yes, yes, I will" — staring at the American
as if he were crazy.)

But if the Army wasn't involved, the American diplomat was asked at the
briefing, then why didn't the Army — that is, the government, of which,
after all, the United States was the main foreign supporter — do something
to stop what seemed a clear effort to disrupt these elections, of which
the United States was also the main foreign supporter?

"Well," the diplomat said, after a pause, "remember that
all this is rooted in the antipathy that exists between the Namphy government
and the Council. The people made it clear that the election was the affair
of the Council. So the government is saying, 'O.K., don't ask for help
from us when you have a problem.' "

Americans at the Embassy had been making
this point for some time — that the confrontation was rooted in the behavior
of both sides. And the point was certainly well taken. But it was also
true that only one side had the guns, and thus the Army's continued "neutrality"
could only lead to one result: the Duvalierists' scuttling the election.
This brought to mind what another American spokesman, during the early,
rocky days of the Namphy regime, had told me: "Look, Namphy is not
a politician; none of these guys are. They're Army men, they don't like
politics, don't understand it, don't trust it. They are trying to hold
the country together." It had seemed a reasonable view then, a few
weeks after the departure of Jean-Claude, but as the parenthèse continued
it had seemed increasingly threadbare. Namphy not a politician? The statement
depended, of course, on how you defined politics, and it gradually became
clear to me that under the Americans' definition Duvalier would not have
been a politician, either; nor, for that matter, would most of the Haitians
now running for President.

From the beginning, the Americans had trusted in General Namphy and
the Army. As an Embassy official told me shortly after Duvalier's fall,
"there are only two nationwide institutions in this country that
could have taken power: the Army and the Church. And the Church doesn't
want it." Having seen to Duvalier's departure with what they viewed
as admirable efficiency, the Americans were faced with the question of
what to do with this poor, mysterious country. And what other choice was
there but to rely on the Army to "broker the transition"?

The diplomat had begun to grow impatient with the barrage of questions
about why the United States did not "apply pressure." Still,
it was clear — to take the most sympathetic interpretation of General
Namphy's motives — that there were already pressures on him, and that
they were mounting. From the two hundred or so Haitians who within months
of Duvalier's all had announced their intention to run for President,
four had now been designated-by some subterranean process affected by
telediol, the fabled Haitian rumor mill, and then affirmed by the radio
stations and the newspapers (and to the intense irritation of Leslie Manigat
and several others) — the "major" candidates.

One of the four, Sylvio Claude, was an untutored, rabble-rousing Baptist
preacher, who had been repeatedly jailed and beaten during Jean-Claude's
reign. ("Here Is the Martyr!" was his election slogan.) He was
wildly popular in the Port-au-Prince slums, and therefore totally unacceptable
to the Haitian élite and the Army that supported it (and, for that matter,
to the Americans; the diplomat shook his head when Claude's name was raised).
Another was Marc Bazin, who during his few months as Duvalier's Finance
Minister had sniffed out and attacked corruption — an accomplishment
for which he was remembered much more warmly by the Americans than by
the Haitian officers and their wealthy friends. A third, Louis Déjoie
II, fondly nicknamed Ti Loulou, was the scion of an old mulatto-elite
family, and a direct descendant of both a founder of the country and a
key nineteenth-century President. Ti Loulou was the son of Senator Louis
Déjoie, the very man whom Franí§ois Duvalier, with the electoral help of
this selfsame Army (including Second Lieutenant Henri Namphy), had defeated
in the hard-fought election of 1957 — whereupon the Senator, never admitting
defeat, had gone into bitter exile,where he and his followers (including
his son) had passed the years plotting to overthrow the dictator. Finally,
there was Gérard Gourgue, the human-rights advocate who had been badly
beaten by Macoutes under Jean-Claude, and whom Namphy, according to diplomats
who knew him well, hated "pathologically." Many Haitians believed
that Gourgue, powered by the Front's nationwide network of priests and
lay workers, had a very good chance of winning the election.

And then there was the election itself; no doubt — as the diplomat now
conceded — there would be "irregularities."

For General Namphy, however, the irregularities were unlikely to
present the major problem. More worrying by far were the thousands of
volunteers all around the country who would be running the election — all
of them supporters of the constitution and therefore by definition anti-Duvalierist
and at least partly anti-Army. In previous Presidential elections, it
had been the Army doing the counting. Now the Army had been frozen out.
But if the Army wasn't counting the votes it still had the guns, and the
power to keep order and protect the process — or not. Of course, keeping
order might well involve shooting at Duvalierists, Macoutes — whatever
-- some of whom happened to have strong connections in the Army; indeed,
some of whom, since the fall of Duvalier, happened to be in the Army (particularly
in the Dessalines Battalion: its powerful commander, Colonel Jean-Claude
Paul, was known to have welcomed a number of Macoutes into the battalion
and to have extended his protection to others who had remained in hiding).
For General Namphy — as his right-hand man in the junta, General Williams
Régala, had stressed to me — preserving the "institutional integrity"
of the Army was paramount, because only the Army could "hold the
country together when all the civil institutions collapsed."

Could General Namphy really be expected to risk that "institutional
integrity" — risk soldiers shooting at soldiers or, worse, risk
seeing his commands ignored, his own position undermined? And for what?
For the Electoral Council? For Gérard Gourgue?

The American diplomat could see this line of reasoning, but he, like
the other American officials I had spoken to, appeared not to accept it.
Indeed, the Americans couldn't afford to accept it. They had to believe
in Namphy, the largehearted non-politician General Namphy. Namphy was theirs,
they told themselves (refusing to recognize that, in reality, they were
his). The General clearly didn't care about power, the Americans insisted;
he was a simple man, who liked nothing better than to drink and play cards
with his buddies. He wanted out, and he could read the balance sheet:
when it came down to it, after all, the country couldn't function without
the Americans. (Without American aid, an Embassy man had told me patiently,
"the Haitian government collapses — poof!") If it weren't for
the Americans, Namphy wouldn't be there. And for the Americans everything hinged on "democratization," as Namphy was well aware. What could the General do? As always, he had to hold the situation together.

Now, toward the close of his briefing,
the American diplomat was asked what would happen if Namphy couldn't hold
things together. "You mean, if anything happens to ... derail ...
the democratic process, shall we say?" he said slowly, and paused.
Then he responded firmly, "An immediate cutoff of all U.S. aid. That's
in the law." As for Bajeux's hope — that the Embassy would "tighten
the screws" — the Embassy appeared to think the screws were tight
enough.

Give the General time. It was a complicated place, Haiti; its problems
were never-ending. (The Haitian proverb "Deye mon, gen mon"
—"Beyond the mountains, more mountains"—had been helpfully
emblazoned on the Embassy's press kits.) In any event, was it not evident,
at least, that the General and the Americans understood one another? "The
judgment that we have is that violence is not on a high enough level to
disrupt the elections," the American diplomat went on. "Now,
if there were daytime violence generalized over the country, I think that
could pose a real threat. Daytime violence would be a more troubling thing."

AS we drove downtown from the briefing under
a brilliant midday sun, we heard the squeal of tires, two or three rapid
machine-gun bursts, screams, then the roar of a panicked, stampeding crowd.
By the time we reached the Rue Pavée, almost within sight of the burned
Council headquarters, people had begun to poke their heads out from doorways
and from behind boxes, where they had dived for cover. On one of the galleried
sidewalks lay a young man of perhaps twenty-five, his arms spread out
amid a pile of cassettes; he had been dead only seconds, but he looked
as if he'd been frozen there forever, precisely posed, in gray pin-striped
pants, white T-shirt, and fancy green-white-and-red knit shoes.

He had been sitting on the sidewalk selling smuggled cassettes, like
the hundreds of other contraband merchants clogging the downtown area,
when a Pajero jeep — the classic Macoute vehicle — screeched by, an Uzi firing
out the window. There was no reason, no warning, no sense, and, before
he could move, a bullet had ripped open his stomach and another had pierced
his right eye, and he was likely dead before he hit the ground, scattering
his cassettes in all directions.

Now a crowd of jostling photographers, mostly white, quickly encircled
him — supplying the Télé Nationale news clip for that night. ("Terreur
générale en centre-ville," the anchor intoned, but the viewer saw
only the swarm of white photographers, their safari vests bristling with
extra lenses, and here and there a glimpse of one of the dead man's fancy
shoes.) Down the block, moans were rising: two others had been badly
wounded.

"I am revolted by this act," Marc Bazin said on that same newscast.
Interviewed outdoors, he squinted behind his steel-rimmed glasses; even
in a short-sleeved blue guayabera, without his World Bank executive's
elegant suit, he remained the self-assured statesman, big-shouldered,
deep-voiced. "The terrorists' strategy is negative — to burn, to spread
terror, chaos, to prevent a better life for Haitians," he said. "But
the elections are the will of the people, and I think they will come off."
Bazin had told me earlier in the day-on which, among other things, his
headquarters had been machine-gunned again, and his main rival had had
bestowed upon him a corpse outside his door — that he would do no more campaigning
for the rest of the week.

On the broadcast, after a public service advertisement showing a woman
carefully choosing, then casting, a ballot, with a voice-over offering
step by-step instructions in Creole (courtesy of the Electoral Council,
whose staff was' no doubt now watching the news, holed up for the night
in its sandbagged, bunkerlike headquarters), came a Louis Déjoie commercial:
To the strains of a sprightly "Déjoie, Déjoie" ditty the candidate — a
bigbellied, light-skinned Ti Loulou — dances his way through an assortment
of wretchedly poor neighborhoods, the crowds mobbing him, kissing him,
poking him, and, most endearingly, putting their hands all over his bald
head. He seems to love it, the dancing, gyrating candidate; his smile
dazzles as he pulls a plump market woman into his arms and waltzes her
about.

On Sunday, I had waited for the Déjoie campaign amid a large crowd gathered
in a parking lot in Croix des Bouquets, not far from the capital. Suddenly,
all was chaos: people began running, and then a singing, swaying parade
of dancing drummers and bamboo-flute players split the crowd as the procession
arrived, at its head the candidate's large white jeep, his bald pate and
fat torso poking through the sunroof, his big arms waving. Amid the crush
of people, everyone was now dancing and singing ("Déjoie, Déjoie!"),
and rum bottles were being passed. The singing went on and on, as the
candidate climbed heavily to the roof of his jeep, waited for the microphone
to be passed hand to hand over the swaying crowd, sang and danced along
for a few verses, and at last began to speak.

Like most political speeches, this one was long on slogans and short
on policies, but it was delivered in the brilliant, colorful Creole for
which Déjoie was famous, and it kept the crowd laughing. He pledged to
represent the peasants, for his party stood for "the politics of
the earth," and he told his cheering audience that the thirty years
of krazé-zo — literally, "breaking bones," or repression —
was over.

Near the end of the speech, he attacked two of his rivals, arguing that
Bazin and Hubert de Ronceray, because they had served Duvalier (de Ronceray
as Minister of Labor and Social Affairs), should have been excluded as
Duvalierists. Déjoie's attack delighted the crowd, but it jolted me; for
this argument tended to undermine the legitimacy of the electoral process
itself -- and as such upheld a key tenet of the Duvalierists, who pointed
to the presence of the two former ministers as proof of the Council's
political bias.

IN the late afternoon of the Tuesday before
the election, I began my round of visits to those important but less vocal
candidates — those whose influence was felt mainly after dark. With two
Haitian friends, I began the ascent up John Brown, retracing the route
of the panicked motorists. As the road climbs higher and higher above
the swarming city, the air grows cooler, the skins grow lighter, and
the ranks of the great houses begin. Here cluster the main players of
Haiti's traditional political game — those who took lead roles in this conjoncture,
as their fathers had in those before.

Just off the Canapé Vert, for example, lies a neat white two-story house
of glass and concrete: the home of Clovis Désinor, a lifelong associate
of Francois Duvalier, who served Papa Doc faithfully as political strategist,
speechwriter, Minister of Finance, Minister of Commerce, and who, until
the Old Man shocked Haitians by bequeathing power to his famously dense
teen-age son, had been judged by many to be Duvalier's rightful heir.
Early in 1985, the mysterious and widely feared Désinor, a stooped-over
seventy-year old black man, broke publicly with Jean-Claude, and he was
believed by many to be the strongest Duvalierist Presidential candidate.
But now the Council had banned him from the elections — after he had been
out of government, a private citizen, for seventeen years.

No, M. Désinor would not speak to me, a somewhat exasperated young man
told me at the gate. No, it made no difference that he had spoken to me
once before. (That had been during the weeks after Jean-Claude fell, when
Désinor, winking and craftily grinning, had warned of the "tendency
toward disorder" growing in Haiti, "a disorder that serves no
one," he said. "Order is the spinal cord of any nation, and
Haiti's spinal cord has been broken. We will see what happens.")
But now, the young man went on, M. Désinor was not speaking to the press,
and particularly not to the American press. Not while his case was in
court. Didn't I know he was appealing the Council decision? Didn't I know
he was going to sue Mike Wallace, after that setup on "60 Minutes"?
(Desinor had unwisely let Wallace interview him in English, a language
he didn't know well, and had found himself goaded into declaring, with
perfect telegenic ferocity, that he was a Duvalierist, and that he was
"proud of it." He meant, of course, a true Duvalierist, the
sort that had not held power since the death of Papa Doc. But how could
stupid Americans be expected to understand such distinctions? Désinor
now blamed Wallace for helping the Council ban him.)

By the time we entered the lovely upper-class neighborhood of Debussy,
it was growing dark, and one of my Haitian friends insisted that I let
him out of the car. Traffic had fallen off, and the few pedestrians on
the street were hurrying home; in half an hour, the streets would be deserted.
It was not a time for visits — especially not there.

A scant half mile from chez Désinor, behind a high wall, stood the large,
rambling white-and-aqua house of General Claude Raymond, a godson of Papa
Doc. As a young officer in the heady, bloody days of the "Duvalier
Revolution," during the early nineteen-sixties, Raymond had commanded
the Presidential Guard and been a leading figure in the Tontons Macoutes;
upon Papa Doc's death, he had served as the armed 'forces' chief of staff,
keeping a watchful eye during the critical early years of Jean-Claude's
regime — before the young dictator, having found new allies, abruptly sent
him off to Spain as Ambassador in 1973. But General Raymond, now retired,
had many supporters, who saw in him a link to the Old Man, to true Duvalierism.
And though his Presidential candidacy had also been disallowed, these
friends had not abandoned him.

During those violent weeks, many would notice that the General's house
had become the scene of curious nocturnal gatherings. Just before nightfall,
its large garden would gradually fill with men, who passed the time lounging
about among a half-dozen four-wheel-drive vehicles parked in the driveway.
Near midnight, it was said, the cars moved out onto the deserted streets.

Tonight, five days before the election, the parking area behind General
Raymond's gate was crowded with jeeps and cars and, leaning against a
pillar, one small chocolate-and-white motorcycle. "That's it!"
my Haitian friend said. "That's the one from yesterday morning."
He had been waiting outside Bajeux's office when the gunmen came: four
in a small white car, and one on a brown-and-white motorcycle.

Just inside the gate, perhaps forty young men, neatly dressed in slacks
and sports shirts, were sitting on the steps or leaning against the cars,
almost all of them black, muscular, and very tough-looking. They were
murmuring to one another in low voices, but when I passed through the
gate, holding my press card in front of me, there was a silence, and not
a friendly one; it persisted as a bearded young man rose and ambled toward
me. No, he said, the General was not there. No, he could assure me he
wasn't. The General was very busy, you see. No, no, waiting for him was
out of the question.

Under the silent stares of the General's assembled supporters — they did
not share the Council's fondness for the foreign press — I walked back to
the car and drove slowly down the deserted street. "You interrupted
them," my friend said, pulling himself up so his head could once
more be seen through the window. "They were cleaning their guns."

NOT long before the shooting began that
night, the weatherbeaten black face of Clovis Désinor appeared on the
television screen, and the old Duvalierist proceeded to address his Haitians
in a frightening, mesmerizing speech. The style — the dark, raspy voice
and rhythmically nodding head; the hypnotic chanting repetition of cryptic,
powerful phrases; the exaggerated raising and lowering of the voice; the
frequent dramatic climaxes — was pure Papa Doc, as were the words, evoking
conspiracy, betrayal, foreign manipulation.

"Haí¯tiennes! Haí¯tiens!" Désinor began, with a fearsome look.
"Nothing is hidden that will not be uncovered." And throughout
his speech he repeated this dark and obscure accusation like a mantra.
He spoke of the "excess and abuse of power cynically practiced by
the members of the Electoral Council," noted that "these collaborationists
... have invited or accepted foreigners," including "the financial
aid of the United States," to hold the elections, and declared flatly
that the Council "plotted the ruin of our sovereignty; for ... the
Council members will rig the votes in order to fulfill the desires of
their ... investors."

Toward the end of the long and rambling discourse, Désinor spoke of God.
"God alone ... our compass" had advised "Clovis Désinor,
His creature" to tell his followers to stay away from the polls Sunday:
"Abstention totale! Don't cover yourselves with shame and ridicule
by participating in these criminal operations of the Electoral. Council,
who betray us ... by conniving with these foreigners." Then, leaning
forward into the camera, the man who had loyally served as the sturdy
right hand of Papa Doc solemnly concluded, "Nonviolence remains de
rigueur."

AROUND midnight, as we sat on the veranda
of the Grand Hotel Oloffson, we heard the shooting begin. But tonight
the bursts of fire had acquired an odd accompaniment. After each shot,
a great metallic clanging rose up, underlaid by a low, mournful howling-hundreds,
then thousands of human voices forming a steady bass under the chaotic
high-pitched smashing of metal against metal. The whole city seemed to
be in an uproar. Listening intently to the din, which had been joined
by the barking of scores of hungry dogs, we managed to isolate one of
its sources — the "hot" slum neighborhood of Carrefour Feuilles.

We crept quietly through the dark garden and peered out into the street.
Under the single street light, several boys had begun to construct a barricade,
dragging hunks of concrete from a building site across the street, lugging
part of a rusted car chassis, rolling into place old stumps and pieces
of wood, and piling up an arsenal of stones.

There was a burst of gunfire nearby, and immediately a great clanging
rose up; fifty yards down the block we could make out the darkened profile
of a tall, emaciated figure smashing a metal rod against a light pole
and howling into the air. The noise died away, and the figure emerged
from the half shadows and began to stride back and forth — shoulders
thrown back, posture almost absurdly erect, metal rod thrust under one
arm-and then to chant, rhythmically, in a haunting, otherworldly tone:
"Toi! Toi! Toi! Lève-toi! " Over and over he chanted in his eerie
voice, striding back and forth, pausing only to smash his metal rod against
the pole after every burst of gunfire: "Toi! Toi! Toi! Toi qui dors!
Lève-toi! " — "You! You! You! You who sleep! Rise up!" It
was the bat tènèb , the "tenebrous beating" by which the Haitian
masses, powerless but for their numbers, had traditionally called to one
another to wake, to rise up and defend their homes. As I watched this
bizarre figure moving in and out of the shadows, I realized he was wearing,
over a dirty T-shirt, an old and ragged flowered dress.

Now a great furor arose in the middle distance: the squeal of tires,
then gunshots, a crescendo of panicked voices, screams, and the sound
of a charging crowd. The steady roar continued. After the nights in which
bursts of gunfire had kept the darkened streets deserted, the city now
had come to life — a strange and violent life played out under the street
lights.

My companions and I got in our car, and, making sure those manning the
first barricade had seen us and knew we were "press" (knew that
we were blans, white foreigners), we drove slowly through the gate and
into this night world. We moved carefully, the car idling along at walking
speed, interior light left on to expose our white faces and yellow press
passes. In this way, shouting "Journalistes! Journalistes! "
all the while, we inched cautiously from the first barricade to a second,
and on to a third, each time hoping that the grim-faced young men at the
next barrier would be reassured to see us pass by their colleagues, and
hold off throwing their stones or charging with their machetes until we
came close enough for them to see our faces.

Most streets were barricaded — with oil drums and scrap lumber, with cinder
blocks, with wrecked cars. At most of the barricades, four or five young
men stood by, some with machetes and clubs, some with stones, ready to
surround and smash the car if the shouted commands to stop, to wait, weren't
heeded. Once, when we turned a corner, screams, clanging machetes, and
a hail of stones forced us to retreat.

Beyond the barricades, the streets were awake but strangely silent; families
sat stone-faced on their steps or in their doorways, seeming — with their
machetes and clubs, their metal rods, their faces garishly lit by the
sulfurous lights — like ghoulish parodies of urban propriety. On one street,
five or six boys played, between two barricades, a vigorous but silent
game of soccer with an unraveling ball of twine.

As we passed into a large intersection, we heard music, and saw across
the way a group of young people frenziedly dancing the merengue. To the
pulsating music blasting from a small cassette player, a young woman and
three men were thrusting their blue-jeaned hips, shaking their machetes
overhead, and bending, whenever they heard shots, to smash them against
the curbside in a great scraping of sparks. As we approached, one dancing
young man, sweat running down his neck, proffered his rum bottle and gestured,
finger to his lips, that he would not speak; then, machete under one arm,
he took my notebook and slowly wrote, in painstaking French, "We
were obliged to do this, because the government is not on the side of
the people. They burned the market. They hurt us. Despite everything,
we will vote Sunday." Finally, at the entrance to a little square
not far from the National Cemetery, our car was stopped, surrounded, and
engulfed by a screaming, stampeding mob. Hands yanked open the doors and
pulled us from the car, then hustled us forward into the square, which
was packed with people, all of them motioning for us to move forward.

At the end of a long aisle of grinning people
was a grotesquely battered hulk of metal that had been a car; on its caved-in
roof lay the mutilated remains of what moments before had been a man.
Our handlers pushed us forward to see the body, which was tightly ringed
by smiling faces. The man had been stripped and pummeled by many hands;
there were long slashes about the trunk, where part of his intestines
had tumbled out, and on the youngish face a series of deep cuts, several
in the peculiar parody-mouth pattern I had noticed that morning; but the
climax had been a tremendous machete blow directly to the crown of the
balding head which had released, in one great sweep from base of skull
to forehead, a three-inch ruffle of brains. His arms were extended outward,
and his hands had been hacked off. An elderly man, his face pressed close
to the body, caught my stare, smiled, and shrugged, as if to say, "I
didn't take them!" Then, as my eyes moved to a bloody machete he
cradled, he said aloud, "We must look for more game tonight!"

Around the smashed car, the people were pushing in upon the body, eager
to talk:

"We are flattered to see you," a young man in a T-shirt, makeshift
club in hand, kept saying, to nods from those beside him.

"You must understand that we are able now to watch over our neighborhood,"
another young man said, in halting French. "You must understand that
we are civilized." The car had come on fast, he said, careering into
the square (we had heard the tires). As the people had closed in around
it, the driver — "the Macoute" — had waved a revolver but had had
no chance to use it before the mob dragged him from the car. How did they
know he was a Macoute?

Angry protestations. Hadn't he had a gun?

Yes, I said, but perhaps he had panicked on seeing the crowd, and tried
to defend himself?

Well, in any case, he was "unknown in the neighborhood."

"You must understand that we are civilized," the young man
said again, to approving nods. "We waited for the car to come."

"We were forced to do this," an old man said. "The government
forced us to do this."

"We'd had enough," a woman said fiercely.

Others repeated with her, "We'd had enough!"

"We joined together to protect ourselves," a man said, and
then, leaning forward, explained, with patient emphasis, "When I
am hit, it causes pain. I learn to hit back."

Then why not go to the—source—perhaps to Désinor's house, or Claude
Raymond's?

"No, no!"—vehemently. I had got it all wrong. "We don't
involve ourselves in political things."

All at once, the crowd was running, stampeding across the square, and
we were pressed against our car. More shooting in the distance, more shouting,
then a siren, whining its way closer.

Cautiously, we drove back through the neighborhood, from one barricade
to another, past the silent people on their steps, past the young men
with machetes standing like statues on their corners, past the little
group dancing the merengue, and the silent footballers still playing,
a wrecked car serving as barricade and goal. When we neared the hotel
gate, we found the tall, thin man still there, striding back and forth
in his ragged dress, chanting into the darkness. As we passed around the
barricade, he halted and said softly, in a raspy, high-pitched voice,
"We have done good work tonight — at last."

BY the time we crept out again, just after
dawn, he had vanished, as had most of the barricades in the now deserted
streets. In the murky gray light of the square, only the smashed car remained,
seeming very small now. The corpse had disappeared.

Driving through the waking city, we found the night's other victims.
On the Grande Rue, a clump of chattering passersby marked a mutilated
corpse: a well-known Macoute from the quartier, the excited people said,
Luc Altidor, known as Café Amè—Bitter Coffee. Last night, he had appeared
after midnight, gasoline can in one hand, revolver in the other. But his
neighbors had been ready. A snickering young man gestured to where the
corpse, naked now but for a shredded T-shirt, had been castrated, then
pointed across the street, where a crowd of laughing people were parading
above their heads in triumph the missing bits of flesh.

In the huge, swampy shantytown of Cité Soleil, crowds surrounded two
partly dismembered corpses, which lay next to an almost unrecognizable
jeep. "They were working for Namphy," a young man told me, pointing
to one of the bodies. "He was getting a bag of rice and fifty dollars
every month. We made him talk before we killed him." But as I looked
at the jeep — a thirty-thousand-dollar vehicle pounded to rubble by a mob
of frenzied people, few of whom saw a hundred dollars in a good year — I
noticed a distinctive marking and, leaning closer, saw printed there "Corvington
Courier & Escort Security Service." Wasn't it possible that these
private security guards had driven uncomprehending into this rabid, frightened
crowd, and panicked when their uniforms didn't show the people that they
were making a terrible mistake? The question remained open for several
days (then members of the Cité Soleil neighborhood brigade appeared on
Télé Nationale to apologize for their unfortunate error), but to the celebrants
in that early morning it was a victory. As we made our way slowly through
the narrow streets, a smiling market woman shouted at the blans, "Tell
America Cité Soleil is doing its work!"

"During this crisis, the people have shown a great maturity,"
Marc Bazin intoned gravely at a press conference that morning. "In
their vast majority, the Haitian people have made their peace with Jean-Claude
Duvalier and his family. And those who want to block this election will
fail — because the people want the election and there is no way to stop
it." What about the government, the Army?

"The government has an air of powerlessness," Bazin said carefully,
after a significant pause, "but we don't know if it's incompetence,
impotence, even indifference."

Shortly before, in the heart of the commercial cacophony of the Route
de Delmas, we had passed a burned vehicle that proved to be an Army jeep.
Three intruders had come in it early that morning. They wore civilian
clothes, but one brandished an Army I.D. card. They fled before the neighborhood
committees, taking refuge in a "Macoute house," from which they
managed, with guns, to hold off the crowd until, according to several
people, "twenty or so soldiers came in a truck" and rescued
them.

Which proved — what? Only that some officers were definitely helping
the Macoutes. But if the Army as an institution was ostentatiously keeping
its nose out of things, as the American diplomat had suggested, then perhaps — perhaps — the elections could come off.

At the new Council headquarters, where the young people were still practicing
on their computers, Louis Roy told me, "The Army is waiting. It will
let the Duvalierists and the neighborhood committees fight it out, let
the terrorism continue. It's all a show for the Americans, to convince
them that only the Army is able to keep order in the country."

When I passed the mangled Macoute on my way back along the Grande Rue,
the remains, now less feet and hands, were surrounded by a swarm of photographers.
By early afternoon, when I was heading for the bustling Iron Market downtown
(into which, moments before, four men had casually strolled, only to draw
automatic weapons and fire into the crowd), the corpse had been dragged
to the middle of the busy boulevard and set afire, to the cheers of a
small crowd. Half an hour later, as I headed to the Hí´pital Général (at
least four people had been badly wounded in that shooting), the corpse
was still burning. And an hour later, as I walked down the steps of the
capital's main morgue (one of the Iron Market victims had died, but reporters,
who wanted to see if there had been more dead, were barred entrance to
the morgue), an ambulance pulled up and two overworked attendants carefully
extracted .a stretcher with the carbonized, scattered, almost unidentifiable last remains of Café Amè, the neighborhood Macoute.

THAT evening's television had the usual
strange jumble of news shows and interview programs: a talk with a Presidential
candidate; film of the Iron Market shootings; increasingly urgent appeals
from the Council ("We need trucks to transport the ballots into the
provinces, people to drive and to provide security").

Then came a bizarre interview with another Presidential candidate, the
usually mild-mannered law professor Grégoire Eugène, who took the occasion
to lash out at the Council, claiming that it was infested with leftists
controlled by Gourgue; that it favored the Front National and therefore
was incapable of running a fair election; that "peasants or fellows
with only basic education" would be easily tricked into voting however
those running the polls wanted them to. And, he hinted, the neighborhood
brigades de vigilance were in fact controlled by the Council — or, at
least, run by those on the left who also ran the Council.

The argument
itself was just another version of the classic Duvalierist attack, denouncing
the elections as what one frustrated candidate called, in a felicitous
phrase, a coup d'état des urnes — a ballot-box coup d'état. It was strange
to be hearing it from Eugène, who was a founder of the Social Christian
Party and a longtime Duvalier opponent. But it was clear now that, although
he was desperate to become President ("Grégoire,'' an American diplomat
told me with a sigh, "Grégoire's for rent"), he had little following.
He was, then, just the respectable but malleable sort the officers might
have preferred had they been in 'a position to choose a président marionette.
And what Eugène was sketching out, I realized as he concluded his scathing
attack, was the perfect rationale for a real coup d'état.

After this interview,
the programming was interrupted, and a long typed announcement scrolled
slowly up the screen: "The situation has been aggravated by the appearance
of groups of peasants known as comités de vigilance which ... only serve
to sow confusion and to render the task of the forces of order more difficult.
... In these conditions, the Minister believes it is his duty to remind
[Haitians] that the maintenance of order and public security is the direct
and exclusive responsibility of the armed forces of Haiti. ... Major General
Williams Régala." The Army had at last weighed in.

In the dark, deserted
streets of the capital, the troops were moving out. From a small covered
carport in front of the Holiday Inn, we watched truck-loads of soldiers
pass by, rounding the front of the spotlit National Palace, circling the
Champ de Mars. Around midnight, shooting began, and we tried-to follow
its progress, but tonight there was no clanging of machetes, no low moaning,
no chanting, and we didn't dare to venture out.

At dawn, it did not take long to see that everything had changed. On
a little street in Carrefour Feuilles we found our first body: a heavyset
man lying face down in a mud puddle, his arms outstretched, the blood
on his shirt still bright red: In his back were four entry wounds, closely
grouped, and only his own digging footprints marked the mud: he had apparently
been shot with an automatic weapon as he tried to run away, probably from
a car or a jeep, and probably less than an hour before. This time, there
were no onlookers eager to talk. People hurried by, the women balancing
buckets of water on their heads, the men carrying their bundles, reluctant
even to look at the man face down in the mud. Who was he? Did you know
him? Not even a word in reply now; just uneasy glances and a mumbled "Pa
konnin"' — "Don't know."

At the corner of Dessalines and
the Rue Chareron, amid a group of silent people, we found a young man
lying — also shot in the back, also very recently. A woman approached,
crying, and shrieked when she saw the body. It was her son; she was quickly
pulled away. An old man told me quietly that soldiers in an Army truck
had shot him. No one else would say a word. Two blocks down, another
small, silent crowd surrounded the body of a skinny old man: he was curled
up on his side, blood staining his white shirt, a red wool cap still on
his head. He, too, had died very recently, in this early-morning sweep
meant to insure that Haitians on their way to work would not miss the
message. When I asked who had done this, I got no answer until, finally,
a man burst out, "It was the soldiers! They were alone in the streets."

On the Avenue Martin Luther King, not far
from the airport, a neatly dressed man in his early thirties lay with
a neat tattoo of bullet holes etched up his spine and neck. The crowd
of murmuring people surrounding him suddenly broke apart and ran in a
panic, and I turned to find an Army truck approaching. But the soldiers
passed by, with only a few mildly interested glances at the corpse and
a few stern looks at the fleeing crowd.

Back in Carrefour Feuilles, a handful of people stood near some porch
steps, at the top of which was posed a slumped and ghoulish figure: a
cadaver, his black face painted as if with some dirty theatrical whiteface,
glinting metal nails protruding from his nostrils. Here, instead of just
driving off, the killers obviously hadn't been able to resist having a
bit of fun. So there sat the white-faced corpse as the residents of Carrefour
Feuilles hurried by, trying not to look. Had this, too, been the work
of the soldiers, intent on driving home to the people that "the maintenance
of order and public security is the direct and exclusive responsibility
of the armed forces"?

That Thursday, for the first time all week, there was no daytime terror
in the capital. As darkness fell, cautious, determined young men pushed
open the gates of the Council building, looked carefully about, then signalled,
and big trucks rumbled slowly out into the street, carrying cartons of
ballots to cities and villages around the country. Around midnight, the
shooting began.

Friday morning, though, there were no bodies. The Army had indeed put
down the brigades -- but to what purpose? The soldiers would not countenance
the challenge of the neighborhood committees, but would they let the election
come off? In Cité Soleil, just after dawn, kerchiefed women were lined
up before the tank truck that sold water to the slum dwellers, each in
turn paying her ten cents and then walking off slowly, effortlessly, majestically,
the big sloshing bucket balanced on her head. The women were stocking
up for the weekend, not knowing what would happen.

Wandering down the black-earth streets of the vast slum, stepping over
the sewage ditches, threading our way through the labyrinthine passageways
that separated the sheet-metal hovels, we asked the people crouching in
the doorways about the voting. But the soldiers had been there the night
before, walking down these streets, emptying their automatic weapons into
the air or into the dirt, and the people were frightened.

In the stinking quarter called Cité Carton (Cardboard City), a man told
me shyly that he would vote for Sylvio Claude, and another brightened
and agreed: Sylvio, the poor black man, the tap-tap driver who had lived
through Duvalier's torture — "They beat him, put him in prison."
In the swampy section called Brooklyn, a skinny, shirtless young man who
was feeding old automobile parts into a caldron of molten metal, making
pots to be sold at the market, wiped the sweat off his brow, dug a paper
out of his pocket, and thrust it at me: "He, he will be our next
President!" It was the poster of Sylvio ("Here Is the Martyr!"),
the squat, square-jawed man in the thick spectacles and ill-fitting cheap
suit who had declared to me two days before that only he, Sylvio Claude,
was a "candidat authentique," "authentic" meaning,
in the peculiar color code of Haitian politics, not just "man of
the people" but black — the true black of the masses.

That afternoon, Ernst Mirville, the Council president, conceded, to a
room packed with journalists, "The Council has had many difficulties,
and many of the technical problems derived from the political ones."
The latter, he said, could be easily summarized: "The government
and the Council do not see things the same way. The Council is a completely
new institution — I conceive of it as a revolutionary institution in Haitian
politics."

AT dawn the next day, the day before the
election, some colleagues and I waited quietly in our car at a crossroads
north of the capital until, rumbling out of the ground fog like a great
sea monster, a big tractor-trailer emerged on the road before us. From
its cab the driver waved nervously, for he was carrying dangerous cargo:
cartons of ballots marked for the Artibonite Valley, one of the "hottest"
areas of the country. Several Council trucks had been attacked during
the last few days. We fell in behind him as he cautiously headed north,
passing through Cabaret, through paddy fields in the Artibonite, past
a series of gasoline-drum-and-sapling roadblocks — unmanned at this hour,
as we had hoped.

At the election bureau in Gonaí¯ves, a crowd was waiting; amid much shouting
and running about, a score or so of young men hurriedly unloaded the big
truck, transferring some of the cartons to a smaller one for the trip
into the Artibonite. Soon we were on the dirt road to Verrettes; the sun
was up, and we were enveloped in a moving cloud of dust that entirely
covered three straw-hatted Haitians who sat with their legs dangling from
the truck's open back. Here and there, peasants working in the fields
straightened, machetes in hand, to watch the truck pass; they knew what
it carried. When we stopped, however, they would not speak. One wrinkled
old man, almost toothless, his bare feet buried in wet mud, mumbled in
response to every question, general and specific, the classic words of
the Haitian peasant confronted with an outsider, who, well intentioned
or not, can only bring him trouble: "M'fè pa politik" — "I'm
not interested in politics."

In Verrettes, young men, watched over by a local priest, rapidly unloaded
the cartons, handing them over one by one to a small cinder-block building,
where they were neatly stacked. The town seemed very tense: people watched
the proceedings from their houses, and a young soldier in olive green,
a carbine slung over his shoulder, stood silently by, looking uncomfortable.

Would there be trouble tomorrow?

"Everything will pass in orderly fashion" was all he would
say, over and over. A middle-aged man wearing wire rimmed glasses, who
was directing the unloading, would say only, "We are determined to
do the elections efficiently — and without the Army." He would not
give his name.

As we left, we passed an Army jeep cruising slowly ahead of its trail
of dust. A few miles away, in the village of Borel, a small blue pickup
rumbled past crammed with eight soldiers, all looking warily out, their
guns at the ready. Along the road, people stood like statues before tiny
mud houses, or leaned over the peculiar green fences (formed of a strange
succulent that grew heavily over a wooden frame) that separated their
bare yards from the dirt road. All watched tensely as the soldiers passed.

We pulled to a stop near a group of villagers and were surrounded by people
anxious to talk. There had been a massacre here, they said excitedly.
On Monday, some Macoutes had burned down the local election bureau. Wednesday
evening, some soldiers from the Verrettes barracks — they had first taken
off their uniform shirts so they couldn't be identified — drove into
Borel shooting; they killed a horse and strafed the local church. Later,
when the truck they had requisitioned came back, the furious villagers
seized it and burned it. Thursday morning, the soldiers returned, accompanied
this time by several armed civilians. Without a word, they opened fire
on the villagers, killing a fifty-six-year old man and two youths, aged
seventeen and fifteen, and some live-stock, and then burned two houses.

"We can't vote, because there is no polling place now," a
teen-ager in a Michael Jackson T-shirt said. "All the people want
to vote, but we don't think the Army will let us."

We heard the rumble
of an approaching vehicle, and the villagers moved away from our car.
It was the blue pickup again, moving even more slowly this time. Now two
young women were standing among the soldiers in the back, both leaning
forward and scanning the scene, occasionally pointing to this or that
house. We followed at a distance.

After a mile of halting progress, the truck came to an abrupt stop, and
suddenly, in a wholly unexpected burst of movement, the soldiers leaped
out, their rifles held high against their chests, fingers on the triggers,
and, fanning out, charged a little mud house as if they were assaulting
a bunker.

We had pulled up about fifty yards back and got out of the car; now we
stood in the middle of the road, transfixed. All at once, the soldiers
became conscious of us. They froze in their charge, then turned to face
us. Everything seemed to stop: the slender young men in olive green stared
at us over their semiautomatic rifles, their faces impassive, and we stared
back, pens poised over notebooks, cameras clutched at chest level. No
one moved. Finally, very deliberately, the lead soldier moved his rifle
in a wide arc, back and forth, at the level of our chests — once, twice,
three times. That was all it would take. It would be that easy. They stared
for one beat more, then turned, climbed silently back into the truck,
joining the two staring female informants, and drove off. We were left
flat-footed in the road, fifty yards from the still unmolested house. No one had come out. Whoever had been about
to be beaten or killed would have at least a few more minutes to enjoy
life in Borel.

As night fell, we returned to Gonaí¯ves, the old City of
Independence, where we found Victor Benoit, the Front's Senate candidate
from Borel, in a small apartment off the main square. He had hidden behind
his house when the soldiers came, he said, then fled into the hills, where
"the peasants protected me." Then he had traveled secretly,
floating down the Artibonite in a banana boat. Now, he told us, the Council
had just issued a communique, cancelling the voting in Verrettes and several
other towns nearby. "They haven't been able to organize, the polling
places have been burned," he said, and he went on, "Here, where
the democratic sector is strong, and the Macoute structure remains strong
as well, there is a struggle between two worlds: the old Macoute world
and the democratic world that is fighting to be born."

AT midnight, the war began. All night long, the machine-gun fire was
incessant; it seemed to come from all around us, sometimes from very close.
At times we heard great explosions, what sounded like grenades; then rifle
shots; then more automatic fire. On the road, only the occasional jeep,
its headlights dark, moved slowly past. Gonaí¯ves seemed to be in the grip
of a great battle. At dawn on Election Day, we drove out cautiously. The
streets were mostly deserted. It was in Raboteau, the enormous slum from
which the entire popular movement that overthrew Duvalier had emerged,
that the night travellers had concentrated their attention: they had strafed
houses, burned and smashed the few cars on the streets, set fires here
and there.

In front of the squat cinder-block building where we had left the ballots
the day before, a noisy crowd had already gathered. It was growing light;
one could see where the election bureau's facade had been freshly raked
with bullets. But soon the polls would be open, and the people, despite
it all, had come to vote.

A few blocks away, we stopped and turned on
the radio for the news from the capital. Radio Haiti Inter was utterly
silent. So was Radio Soleil. We moved rapidly through the dial. Silence.
(Hours earlier, armed men had smashed Radio Haiti Inter with grenades,
had machine-gunned Radio Antilles, had blown up Radio Soleil's transmitter.)
Only one station, finally, Radio Métropole, seemed to be broadcasting,
and it played only music marches.

In the distance, suddenly, there was shooting, then screams.

We found the corner in front of the election bureau, which not five minutes before
had been crowded with hundreds of jostling people, absolutely deserted.
In the middle of the empty street, a white motor scooter lay on its side,
one of its wheels still turning. In the intersection, a fire was burning:
four or five of the cartons we had seen delivered the day before had been
stacked up, with handfuls of ballots stuffed around them as kindling,
and set afire. Through the flames, among the crumpled, charred ballots,
I could make out the faces of Marc Bazin and Gérard Gourgue. The fire
burned fitfully. Apart from its gentle rustling, there was silence.

I moved to the building and, stepping over the threshold, had time to
glimpse the stacked cartons, each with a single ballot taped to its side,
and to think, They missed so many, before the shots began. A black sedan,
seemingly dropped out of the sky, came hurtling around the corner, guns
firing from windows on both sides. I fell down inside the small open vestibule,
heard bullets hit the facade, the shots echo. Focussing my eyes on the
floor tiles against my nose, I heard the screeching tires fade, and the
revved-up engine; then nothing.

As I came out on the porch, locking eyes with my colleagues, who were
just emerging from behind a parked car across the street, all of us brushing
ourselves off, the black sedan was there again, just as suddenly, just
as loudly. I fell face forward on the stoop and heard the bullets strike
against the building just above me, felt them strike, and felt a shower
of plaster dust gently falling on my back and neck.

Again, the car was
gone. I got up, ran across the street, and joined my friends, who were
crouched behind some pillars. After a few moments, we moved tentatively
out into the street, and instantly there were shots, this time single
shots, from somewhere overhead: a sniper or snipers in the window of one
of the buildings nearby.

It had all been very well prepared. It was clear that no one, not even
nosy white journalists, would get near the Gonaí¯ves voting bureau on this
Election Day.

We made a last pass through Raboteau and found people standing
warily in their doorways, or huddled together on their porches. There
was no more defiance. "Haitians will not vote today!" one man
shouted. All the speculation, the musings about whether the elections
would come off, the Embassy briefings and the candidate interviews and
the rest, suddenly seemed absurd; it had all come down to who had the guns
and who did not, who was willing to use them and who was not. (Passing
the mustard-yellow barracks, we saw the soldiers sitting, standing, milling
about. They seemed tense, solemn, as they watched us drive by.) As we
headed into one of the slum's main streets, a woman shouted to her friends,
"Here come the Americans to save us!" and there was bitter
laughter.

At the town of L'Estère, in the Artibonite, we saw peasants waiting in
a long line that snaked past the Church of the Immaculate Conception:
women in kerchiefs, men in straw hats — perhaps a hundred of them — all
waiting to reach a small shed opposite the church. As we walked toward
it, there was shooting, and we flinched, and the crowd laughed and pointed
at us in delight. Up on the road, the soldiers were striding by, firing.
But here the people would not be frightened.

Inside the shed, five people sat calmly behind old wooden school desks
on which stacks of white paper were arranged — more than a score for
the Presidential candidates alone. Next to the stacks stood three of the
gray plastic ballot boxes donated by the Canadians. As I watched, a young
man at the head of the line stepped forward, paused, looked around, then
said shyly, in a soft voice, "Sylvio." A woman behind the desk
picked a paper from one of the stacks and handed it to him. He folded
it slowly and put it in one of the boxes, then waited while the poll workers
ceremoniously plucked a ballot from each of the remaining stacks and handed
them to him, so he could tear them up and throw them in the wastebasket.
The woman took his hand and dipped his little finger in a small, rusted
can full of red ink. As he left, smiling at his red finger, the next man
came forward. I watched for several minutes. Sylvio seemed to be doing
rather well.

The voting in L'Estère had begun at 6 A.M., and already seventy-four
people had cast their ballots. (A man was marking crosshatches carefully
on a scrap of paper.) But hadn't they heard — as we just had, on the
one radio station still functioning — that the election had been cancelled?
It didn't matter. In L'Estère, the voting would go on.

The trip back to the capital — a lovely and familiar drive, between sea
and palm trees, on a beautiful day — was taken at breakneck speed and
filled with strange and frightening interruptions: roadblocks manned by
grimfaced soldiers, who plainly didn't know what to do with us; a pickup
truck carrying a bloody, badly wounded brigade de vigilance member (shot
by soldiers the night before) and his weeping brother; makeshift roadblocks
thrown up by armed and angry men whose loyalties, and purposes, were obscure.

South of Saint-Marc, at Freycinau, we were stopped by a crowd of furious
peasants armed with machetes. They were manning one roadblock (a newly
felled tree) and were backed up by a second — a tractor-trailer truck
jackknifed across the road, which, we realized with a sickening feeling,
was the very truck we had escorted north the morning before.

The shouting peasants surrounded our car, smashing it with their machetes,
and pulled us out; we raised our hands with our press passes and shouted,
"Journalistes! Journalistes!," but they were inflamed, frightened,
crazy. "Communistes! Communistes!" I heard several yell. (Hadn't
someone yelled that the past summer, at the political leader as he tried
to speak, just before the peasants swarmed over him and hacked him to
pieces?) As they were raising their machetes and feinting forward, I caught
the eye of an old peasant in a red shirt, who was raising his machete
a few feet from me — he didn't seem interested in the press pass I held
out in front of my chest like a pitiful shield — and all at once I pictured
the handless man lying on the car roof and thought, My God, just like
this? In this place? Then: And what a story that would make — imagining
the photographers jostling about. (I learned only later that a CBS crew
had come up behind us in their car and had kept their camera running
as it lay on the dashboard, and that the confrontation would appear on
the news that night.)

We were still standing paralyzed, press passes against machetes, praying
that no one would strike first, when a four-wheel-drive appeared from
the other direction. The driver, a well-heeled Haitian, shouted to the
peasants, demanded to know what they were doing, told them we weren't
Communists, and persuaded them to let us go. The disgruntled peasants
demanded money, and took a few dollars and a camera or two before letting
us proceed slowly around the big truck.

AT dawn on that election morning, Port-au-Prince
had been blanketed in gray smoke. On the grounds of the National Palace,
the troops of the Presidential Guard were drawn up in their morning muster,
receiving orders from their commander. On their patrols this fateful day,
Colonel Charles Louis told them carefully, they were "not to interfere"
and, above all, "not to fire on 'the cars' in the street, no matter
what you see" — an order that, according to the Guardsman who later
described this scene, "everyone understood to mean not to interfere
with the attacks."

A few blocks away, armed men were invading the Sacré Coeur, smashing
the altar and beating the priests and several worshippers with machetes
and rifle butts. Outside the home of General Claude Raymond, a mysterious
Sunday-morning traffic jam had formed, as a contingent of four-wheel-drives
struggled to make its way through the General's narrow gate. A young European
woman, driving down the street in her own jeep, became caught up in the
jumble; an angry driver cursed and, as she passed the gate, shot her in
the back.

Not long afterward, near one of the busiest corners of the city, where
the Avenue John Brown, sloping up toward Pétionville, meets the Avenue
Martin Luther King, a great crowd of men surged forward, moving down the
main streets and transforming a pleasant, fairly prosperous neighborhood
into a bloody anarchy that hadn't been seen since the heyday of Papa Doc.

Most of the men were armed with machetes and clubs, though some had guns,
and they were smashing cars and beating people who fled before them. In
the midst of this roiling mob moved a gray Daihatsu Charade and a blue
Suzuki jeep, which circled methodically as the men inside fired weapons
from the windows. The cars were "like the center point ... of the
Macoutes' activities there," said Geoffrey Smith, an Australian freelance
photographer who, with a Haitian friend, had found himself in the neighborhood.
"The gray Charade was just circling around, firing and circling,
as if it were a radio-controlled toy."

On a corner, a small white car had been run up on a sidewalk, its windshield
shattered, its driver, slashed with a machete, lying dead beside it, his
wife shot and wounded. Not far from the corner of John Brown and Martin
Luther King, three pedestrians, presumably on their way to vote, were
shot where they stood. Suddenly, an Army truck loaded with soldiers turned
on to the Avenue John Brown. And there, not far from the Ruelle Vaillant
— a cul-de-sac at the end of which lay the í‰cole Argentine de Bellegardes,
a little gingerbread school that today had become a polling place crowded
with voters — the Army truck pulled up next to the gray Charade, and
the car's occupants chatted for a moment with the soldiers. (Whether these
were Presidential Guardsmen, punctiliously following their orders "not
to interfere," or troops of the Dessalines Battalion is not known.)
Whereupon the soldiers drove off and the mob of Macoutes, with their
machetes and clubs and guns, moved down the Ruelle Vaillant.

What happened next was sketched out, as so often that, week, by the outline
of the corpses. As the first victims were shot, on the road leading to
the school, the people waiting to vote —w ho, sheltered in the school's
closed-in courtyard, had been oblivious of the chaos on the street outside —
began to run away in terror. Finding no exit, they poured into four
tiny, open-air classrooms to the right, pushing and clawing, burrowing
under the benches, crouching behind cartons, pulling over them any furniture
or boxes that came to hand.

And so the Macoutes, advancing steadily on the terrified, unarmed people,
could kill at leisure. When the men with machine guns had emptied their
weapons, their machete-wielding colleagues moved in, hacking off limbs,
decapitating at least one woman, turning the small courtyard for a few
nightmarish moments into a howling slaughterhouse.

Then the men were gone and strangely, were almost immediately followed
by two fire trucks, bristling with soldiers, and three ambulances. Geoffrey
Smith was one of the first to reach the school. The Army's subsequent
arrival was "very quick, too quick," Smith told me. "They
didn't want witnesses, you see."

The plan seemed to be to remove most of the bodies immediately, leaving
just a few, "to make people believe only this happened" — that
is, to lessen the scale of the massacre. The bodies would be whisked away
and would disappear into a secret grave. The Ruelle Vaillant would be
a massacre but, at least for the world press, a small one — four or five
people, perhaps.

Smith and others, however, chanced to be nearby. Moving from room to
room, they saw about twenty people, shot to pieces. In one classroom,
in particular, Smith said, "the people had huddled around the wall,
and in two other classrooms there were people underneath the benches.
They'd heard shooting in the street, they'd run in here thinking it was
safe. But because they were all literally around the wall, it was just
a simple matter of spraying them with gunfire. The two women who had
been running the elections were the persons with their faces shot half
off, lying there with the pamphlets and everything all over the floor.
In the room with the most people, about-ten, there was one woman screaming
in the corner, and another woman over near the far wall was just ... shaking
around. And as the soldiers moved from room to room they found more people
still alive, who were pretty well buried under the school desks and the
bodies, still lying there in the pools of blood.

"There was such an ambience of palpable evil and cold, cold fear.
I mean, the poor people who'd somehow survived were there screaming simply
out of a state of absolute shock. I'm talking about people who were stood
in front of a wall and were sprayed with bullets, and were then lying
in a mass of bodies. That fear pervaded the whole area—an extremely strong
ambience, as if an evil plague had swept through, like a wind or something."

By this time, with the camera crews and photographers arriving, the ambulances,
packed to capacity with corpses and a few survivors, drove off, and the
soldiers left. As the journalists stood amid the remaining bodies, a green
Volvo station wagon pulled up, and four men got out and started shooting.
The journalists fled toward the school, retracing the bloody path taken
by the voters less than half an hour before, then struggled in terror
to scale the walls behind the school. The Macoutes moved forward, firing
steadily. Smith was shot in the leg. Three members of an ABC News crew
were wounded. A Dominican cameraman, just getting out of his car, raised
his hands in bewildered surrender and was shot at point-blank range, collapsing
and then (as one fleeing witness, looking back over his shoulder, glimpsed
him) "literally swimming, hand over hand, in a lake of blood, groaning,
'Help me, help me.' " He died later in the hospital. A photographer,
Jean-Bernard Diederich, who was scrambling over a high wall, looked back
and saw a man taking aim. "I couldn't see his face," he said,
"but it was definitely a soldier." Several witnesses later claimed
to have recognized the olivegreen-clad troops of the Dessalines Battalion.

BY midmorning, Port-au-Prince, with its
almost one million inhabitants, had taken on the uniquely sinister aspect
of a great metropolis that stands unaccountably deserted under a shadowless
light. Only in front of the cathedral was there a human presence: a young
man lying in a little pool of blood, staring up at the bright sun. Arms
splayed, shirt torn, this peaceful, sun-warmed corpse had seemingly become
the capital's sole resident.

His living compatriots, having been transported with awful abruptness
back to a time that many of them remembered all too well, cowered indoors.
Hiding as well were the members of the Electoral Council, including its
president, Ernst Mirville, who, shortly after the Ruelle Vaillant massacre,
had telephoned Radio Métropole from an undisclosed location to announce
that the elections had been postponed "to a later date."

For Haitians, the limits to wholesale brutality—the unflinching daylight
massacre of innocents—that had been drawn since the fall of Duvalier
had in a few minutes been swept away. The streets of the capital empty
at midday, the sirens wailing, the corpses of men, women, and children
lying in pools of blood, all the taut aftermath of a convulsion of unbridled
violence -- "All this brings back Duvalier, the father, I mean,"
a well-to-do woman told me over the telephone. "People who were here
then are flipping out now. Those who can are trying to get out. You see,"
she said, after a pause, "you think it was a massacre, but this was
just a normal day under Duvalier."

So the people stayed inside, where, in the afternoon, they could see
an angry General Namphy appear on T él é Nationale to launch, hours after
the massacre, a stinging attack-on the Electoral Council. His face ominous
behind his tortoiseshell glasses, his deep voice almost shouting as he
struggled to master his stutter, the General denounced the Council for
"inviting foreign powers to meddle in the internal affairs of the
country." He had decided "to put an end" to the Council
but vowed his "determination to conduct to the end ... the democratic
process which must culminate in the installation on February 7, 1988,
of a President freely elected by the Haitian people." Those final
words—"librement elu par le peuple haí¯tien!"—the General
barked out, emphasizing each syllable, while he stared into the camera
with a baleful grimace, as if daring his viewers to challenge him.

That evening, before the shooting began, a tired representative of the
"foreign powers" to which the General had referred appeared
at the Holiday Inn before the assembled journalists, who assailed him
with angry questions. Jeffrey Lite, the American Embassy spokesman, looked
wan and pale as he announced that the United States had "terminated
all military assistance to Haiti." This amounted to $1.2 million,
most of it already spent. An additional hundred and six million dollars,
which, together with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund money
tied to it, floated the Haitian economy, "was being reviewed."
(That night, Washington announced the cutoff of the bulk of that — about
sixty-two million dollars, or all but "humanitarian aid," which
was mostly food shipments.)

To the cascade of questions Lite had little new to say. The United States
had supported the "rapid, orderly, and peaceful transition to democracy
in Haiti." And while it had been "apparent that the government
and the Council were at loggerheads for many months — still, 'we thought..."
His voice trailed off.

Could it be that the Embassy, with all its sources, had had no warning
of the attacks?

"Today," Lite said slowly. Then he paused, closing his eyes
briefly. "Today was a surprise."

And now not only had the whole jerry-built transition so carefully shepherded
by the Embassy collapsed in a spectacular mess but the Americans found
themselves forced to do what they had dreaded doing, even as a last resort:
they were forced to cut off their aid. "We've fired that bullet now,"
an American diplomat told me, with a sigh, several days later. "Now
that chamber — the biggest chamber — is empty." The Americans,
having carried out their threat, had nothing else to threaten. And General
Namphy had nothing else to lose.

Namphy would now pick his own council. That meant that the Army would
be running elections and would control their result, which in turn meant
that the "popular" candidates — not only Gourgue but probably
Claude, Déjoie, and Bazin as well-seeing in such an arrangement nothing
for themselves except the destruction of their popular credibility, would
decline to run.

Sunday night, truckloads of soldiers moved out into the city. On that
and subsequent nights, the shooting was heavy. In Carrefour Feuilles and
the other slums where the brigades de vigilance had been strongest, the
soldiers moved in in force, emptying their clips and rounding up any young
men they found. There were persistent rumors — never confirmed — of secret
executions, even massacres, in Fort Dimanche. And why not? After all,
it had happened many times before.

DURING the weeks that led up to a second
election, on January 17th, the process of exclusion accelerated. Sylvio
Claude was accused of urging an American invasion — a lethal charge in
Haiti. (In reality, he had asked for an international force to observe
any future vote.) Télé Nationale played and replayed film reports of ballot-stuffing
— the heart of a campaign to discredit the November 29th election and,
thereby, all four major candidates. The four candidates, for their part,
made it clear that they wouldn't participate in Namphy's election. ("We
don't oppose elections," Bajeux told me. "We oppose elections
with this government. The country is now being run by a herd of murderers.")
Defiantly, they issued a call for a general strike against the government.
But the people did not halt their business in a great show of revulsion
against Namphy and the election violence; they did not respond to the
four candidates who claimed to represent them. No doubt, as Bazin told
me, "they were scared to death." But there was something more.
"After the uprising failed last summer," a young Liberation
priest told me, "the people saw the elections as the only way to
uproot the Macoutes. It was like a religion." And now, in a few moments
of horror, the Macoutes had proved that religion false, powerless. And
they had lost their faith. "The people are psychologically and economically
exhausted," Michel Soukar, a leading figure in the Front, conceded.
"We don't think the people have the means to get rid of the Namphy
government unless they have help on the international level — as they
did to get Duvalier out."

Seeking "help on the international level" — to isolate the
Namphy regime, and force it out before it could hold its own elections — quickly became the strategy of the four candidates, thus, paradoxically,
lending some truth to the government propaganda. Déjoie flew to the United
States, met in Washington with Administration and congressional figures,
and delivered a rousing address to a crowded meeting hall on the Upper
West Side of Manhattan, where several hundred Haitians of the diaspora,
incongruous in heavy coats and scarves, delighted in his colorful Creole
and bold rhetoric. Of the coming election he said, "Any candidate
[who wins] would be chosen by the Army, and he wouldn't be able to govern,
I'll tell you that. We will not accept this government! We will continue
our fight!" It was like the old days, when his father, in the same
city, had said the same things about Duvalier.

THERE is no alternative — it's as simple
as that," an American diplomat said, when asked why the Embassy was
ignoring Déjoie's call for further sanctions, why it was letting the Namphy
electoral process run its course.

"Actually," a second diplomat put in, leaning back in his chair,
"from Duvalier's departure on, that fact has defined the situation
here: there is no alternative."

The first diplomat paused and took a spoonful of grapefruit. The three
of us were sitting in the pleasant, leafy garden of the first diplomat's
house, not very far from the Ruelle Vaillant. "The Embassy has been
pushing to get the four big candidates together for a long time,"
he said. "Finally, in mid-December we received the four candidates
at the Embassy. We said, 'Look, we'd like to do something for you. But
you have to prove you're leaders in order for us to back you — leaders
as well as vote-getters. You have to show that the ninety per cent of
Haitians who supposedly follow you will really hearken to your call."'

"And they couldn't do that," the second man said. "At
least one strike would have had to stick, but the strikes were failures,
jokes. These guys have voters, not followers."

The first diplomat leaned forward. "Look, in the end, politics is
compromise, cooperation, coalition-building — and, to be frank, Haitians
have never shown a talent for any of those," he said. "What
is it they say? `There's a bit of Macoute in every Haitian.' " He
took a sip of coffee. "So now, of course, all you hear them saying
is `It's the Americans' fault.' The centrist politicians say, `We know
you Americans could make it stop, you could make Namphy behave and the
Macoutes disappear, if only you'd apply pressure.' " I thought of
Bajeux. "And the radicals say, `This whole slaughter here is your
fault, because, in fact, they did it with your support.' And the hard-liners
— within the government, in the Army, wherever — they say, `Why the
hell aren't you Americans supporting us? I mean, we're fighting Communists
here!' "

"Of course, in the end I don't think Mr. Castro is very interested
in Haiti," the second diplomat said. "This country is like a
very old patient in a hospital, and he's on the machine, but even though
the doctors see no sign of recovery, they don't pull the plug — they
try to do what they can. So we tried to do that, and maybe we should have
done it differently. But that might not have worked, either. Intervention
is a very complicated thing, and it usually doesn't work out the way you
think."

ON December 30th, Professor Leslie Manigat
appeared on television. He made, everyone agreed afterward, an extraordinary
speech — elegant in language, brilliant in argument. Manigat noted that
the Army "constitutes, in any case, an institution without which
— still less against which — no workable political solution can be found."
He mocked the strategy of the so-called four major candidates — noting
that though each claimed to control sixty to seventy per cent of the vote,
making their collective support at least two hundred and forty per cent
of the Haitian electorate, they had been unable to bring off a general
strike a week after the massacre. Then this man who had been so long in
exile, so long a fighter for Haitian democracy, announced that his party — "the
party of the opening" ("le parti de l'ouverture"), punning
on the name of the country's founder, Toussaint Louverture, had decided
to take part in the Army's elections.

During the first weeks of January, the discussion came to center on whom
the officers would choose. Would it be Grégoire Eugène, a mild and seemingly
malleable man? Or Hubert de Ronceray, who had served many years as Jean-Claude
Duvalier's Minister of Labor and Social Welfare before jumping ship to
become an "opposition leader" several months before the dictator
fell? Or Leslie Manigat, the prestigious intellectual?

On January 17th, the voting was very light throughout Port-au-Prince;
in many places, the polls seemed to be empty or nearly so all day. Outside
one small polling place, I heard music and, glancing inside, saw a radio
sitting on a desk with its stacks of ballots, next to which two soldiers
were dancing the merengue, holding their automatic rifles above their
heads as they thrust their hips. North of the city, my colleagues and
I found near-empty polling places as well, though in Saint-Marc we watched
a group of young men — few of them looked old enough to vote — push
forward to cast their ballots in a little school. Several objected angrily
when the poll worker tried to mark their fingers with red dye. Curious,
we followed them as they piled into a pickup truck and drove to a pretty
house a mile or so away and disappeared inside. When they reemerged, they
were all wiping their hands: they had washed off the red. They piled into
the truck to vote again.

They were voting for Manigat — a fact that was not hard to discern,
for, as at most places that day, the ballots were distributed outside
the polls by young men who stood in a group and competed for the attention
of the prospective voter. When he had marked his ballot, the voter handed
it to a poll worker, who thereupon scrutinized it, often announcing the
choice, and placed it in the ballot box.

That morning, in a polling place across from the National Palace, a soldier
had told me his colonel had given an order: "Manigat is the man of
the Army. Vote for Manigat." The next day, a bitter Grégoire Eugène
said to me, "I had known two days before that the elections would
be a joke. I gave fifty thousand of my ballots to a candidate for mayor
for him to have distributed around Port-au-Prince. Then I learned he had
Manigat's ballots distributed instead. I called him and was told, 'As
an old soldier, I had to follow orders.' We assumed he was referring to
the head of the Army."

Most Haitians seemed to agree with Eugène that the elections were "a
joke"; but what, exactly, made them so? That there had obviously
been cheating? True, but it was impossible to tell how much. That a number
of evidently popular candidates had boycotted the vote? Yes, but they
had done so of their own accord. That so few people had voted? Yes, but
those people, too, had acted voluntarily, and, in any event, the government
later claimed that thirty-five per cent of the Haitians had voted, insisting
that in the provinces, especially in places one could not reach in a day
without a helicopter, the turnout had been very high indeed. And, of course,
it could have been true: there was no way to tell, just as there was no
real way to be sure, in a country without polls, with few roads, and with
an illiterate population, that the four "major candidates" still
controlled more than ninety per cent of the vote.

And so, behind the closed doors of Namphy's Council headquarters — journalists
had been hustled out at gun point—the counting went on, and on. And
finally the Council members announced that they had completed their work
and had determined that in this difficult, dangerous election, held under
such perilous conditions, one man had somehow managed to secure a majority — miraculously,
a bare 50.27 per cent, thus making a runoff unnecessary. The victor was
an intellectual, an academic of international reputation, the scion of
a distinguished family, a man all Haitians could be proud of—and on whom
other countries, in time, might well look kindly.

Thus, on February 7, 1988, the second anniversary of the glorious fall
of the dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, in the sullen, exhausted country,
its foreign-aid lifelines severed, its economy collapsing, its people
angry, Leslie F. Manigat, the master of the conjoncture, came to power.